OK I put together my wagon the weekend of June 4th. I didn’t get a chance to report on it because I was at training all last week. MAD sent me some direction improvement tips but unfortunately I didn’t get them until after I discovered them for myself. I agree with most of his suggestions but I have a couple of my own if you try to follow their instructions as written.
When you bolt the rear axle to the chassis, leave the bolts loose. Later on in the instructions they will tell you to slide the dump pivot axle in and I needed to loosen the bolts to get the axle through all the holes. Grease is a good thing at this point and if I had the time I would have seriously considered adding zerk fittings (I probably will at a later date).
This brings us to the wheels which attach via a good sized cotter pin. You can’t slide the dump axle in with the rear wheel attached and of course they tell you to attach it much earlier in the assembly procedure. Bending the cotter pins wasn’t easy; straightening them to get the wheels off is harder. Yes, I ended up taking both wheels off because I struggled trying to get the dump axle in from both ends before loosening the rear axle mounting bolts (see above tip).
They didn’t ship the ¾” washers needed on the dump axle or the tow bar axle. Also, they didn’t send me the tow bar axle (3/4” x 4 3/8”). Someone made the comment that once the pressure treated boards sit in the sun a while and shrink, gaps in the floorboard develop that are “wide enough to throw a cat through” , which, BTW is one of the funniest comments I’ve heard in a while. In my case, a good size kitten could fall through while the boards are fresh and wet. I expect that pretty soon it won’t even be remotely challenging to throw a cat through the gaps in my floorboards. I thought: “No problem, I have an 8’ piece of 5/4 PT decking lying around, I’ll just rip it to a tight fit”. The problem is the boards are ¾” thick so you’d have to plane a standard deck board down to fit.
One other complaint: the kingpins on the steering knuckles (which come pre-assembled) have the welded head of the pin at the bottom and the washer/cotter pin at the top. It just seems backwards to me; if the cotter pin fails the kingpin falls out. If it was turned the other way around, the kingpin could remain working even without a cotter pin.
I haven’t used it for hauling anything except a few kids and adults at my daughter’s birthday party. I have ordered a cylinder and my next plan is to design a drop tailgate vs. the slide-out design. By the time I get to those changes my deck boards will hopefully have finished shrinking and I’ll rip my deck board to width, bring it to my friend’s house to plane it, and have a solid floor for once.