Wooden Wheelbarrow Plans for Dummy Woodworkers

Wooden wheelbarrow

Our founder's sister is crafty... in the sense that she makes and sells "country" crafts and decor. Almost all her crafts are made of fabric, but country style also includes "rustic" articles intended to look old-timey like, say, the yard planter built to look like a nineteenth-century wooden wheelbarrow at left. If you wanted to build your own, you might Google "Plans for a Wooden Wheelbarrow,"¹ but Lord help you if you try to use the plans cribbed from an online Society for Creative Anachronism website by eHowian Robert Preston: you'd probably be disappointed (and more than a little surprised).

Preston's introduction defines a wheelbarrow, even making tangential reference to lever types (though the J-school graduate very likely doesn't remember simple machines from 5th grade science class). He then launches into an extremely detailed copy-reword-paste job of plans he found for a 16th-century wooden version of the wheelbarrow. We suggest, by the way, going to the original; which has pictures and instructions written by someone who understands them.

What originally caught our search team member's eye, however, was this entry in Robert's material list:

"2-foot-by-12-foot planks of wood"

Yup, Robert, or more likely his content editor, thinks a 2-by-12 is 2 feet thick and 12 feet high; dimensions that would cause the resulting "plank" to weigh almost 1000 pounds per linear foot! The "planks" business is fairly standard for eHow and its niche sites (e.g., Hunker) where lumber is invariable called "beams" or "planks," but rarely "boards."

Preston reproduces the original instructions in 20 steps, filled with such useful information as "Cut around the knob in the left-most section, along the remainder of the horizontal line in the left-most section, then around the arc in the second section with the jigsaw..." ...at which our house carpenter simply said, "Huh?" Robert's plans are, of course, incomplete: the original plans call for pegged mortise and tenon joints, the instructions for which Robert reduces -- we think -- to

"Drill three holes between each set of pencil lines, 3 inches, 6 inches and 9 inches from where the lines touch the bottom plank..."

We looked and looked and have no idea what purpose these holes might serve... though in reality, Preston "modified" his plans to call for simply attaching the 2-by-12s that make the bottom and ends of of the barrow with wood screws. Apparently, Bobby stole that step from plans for a garden planter because he didn't understand mortise and tenon joints. The nifty wooden wheelbarrow shown at left could be made with the plans Preston attempted to copy, but -- again -- we suggest that anyone wanting to make this fine-looking replica go to the original!

No, folks, these aren't plans for a wooden wheelbarrow. These are a mashup of plans from different websites, carefully reworded to make them look useful but in reality utterly useless. For his efforts, Preston is now the proud owner of a Dumbass of the Day award. Maybe he can keep it in his wheelbarrow; if, that is, the weight of the paper doesn't make it collapse...

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was    ehow.com/how_7472165_plans-wooden-wheelbarrow.html

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