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Woodworking With Elijah

Elijah still loves to ride around on his little John Deere tractor. A few weeks ago, he asked me to help him hook up one of his other toys to the back so he could pull it around. I quickly fashioned something out of wire and he got a kick out of that but I knew we could do better.

When I had the week off for Thanksgiving, we headed to Home Depot to pick up some lawnmower wheels and a couple pieces of hardware and then went into the shop together to build a better trailer for his tractor. We got started and then while he was sleeping that night, I got most of the rest of it figured out. I left one or two cuts on every tool that we were going to use so he’d get to experience them all. It took us about an hour to finish it all up but he stayed engaged the entire time. The only hiccup came when he put one of the nuts on his finger and couldn’t get it off. I had to butter up his finger to pull it off.

The final result looks pretty good and gets lots of using hauling toys around the house. I doubt this will be the last project we do together!

wagonproject1 wagonproject2 wagonproject3

In case you’re wondering, the nuts on the end of the axle are held on with thread locker (blue) to keep them from spinning off when the wheels turn.

One thought on “Woodworking With Elijah

  1. Dudley

    Nice plan. Nice project. Now to prepare Elijah for those numerous times when people stand around saying, “I never could do that.”, please teach me grandson how to back up that two wheeled trailer.