Wooden DIY / MYOG Sled / Ahkio / Pulk ?

Heres a few shots of my latest woodcraft. Its just a wooden pulk, or an "ahkio" as we call em that i did to try out few ideas before making one from good materials for my knifemaker friend, so this is more like a prototype but it migh just work ;).

All the wood / plywood is recycled, the bottom piece i took from an old wooden bed, the sides are from big tool chest, and the back piece is taken from a paint shops garbage can. Pretty crude, but still i had to remove whole load of nails, screws, paints and gold glue stains and such.

All the hardware is from my bilion-box and from our only gas stations selections, so there aint much of fancy stuff used, as i did not have lots to choose from. The steel wire will propably get changed to paracord or something when i find a good piece of usable cord...

                                          Floors back corner is rounded as much as i could, so i can reverse a bit too without ahkio jamming instantly when backing up. By the way, all the screws are with T15 torx head, so you need only one tool to rebuild / repair this, and theres not a single drop of any glue either to make repairs easy. I have scrubbed in the plywood, some 5 deciliters of some wood furniture oil, thats how much it took, when i started to pour the oil inside the ahkio and waited and waited till it sweated through the bottom. So i think its pretty well impregnated now.  I will add,during next week, a pair of narrow "ski´s" on the bottom as well, to make the ahkio keep its direction well.

Li´l bit of seat in it, if someday it has to be used to transport a person with injured leg etc. Two of the 5 hooks are there too.

The sidewalls have 10 degrees cutting, i would have made more angle but my side pieces are so shallow that more degrees would have made the sides too low and useless.

Front part narrows just after the crossmember of the floor, approximately 8 centimeters to keep the ahkio better to keep its direction an to just travel easier in the snow. It was bit troublesome to fit the sides with angles, all together tighlty with nose that gets narrow towards the tip, and in a way that the bottom piece still would have an even tight fit against the floor part, so i used the rasp to fit em as well as i could in a limited time. All together this too some 8 hours to accomplish to the point where it is in the pictures,after i managed to bend the tip, which took about 10 hours of keeping it all throughly wet and bending it slowly with rope and wooden block as a mold.  in which it still misses a few details, like the attachments to the poles used to pull this thingy etc.

                                        It has a narrower fron part. Not much but a little bit.

This isnt that huge at all, i made this kind of a light and compact, keeping in mind that i wanted to be able to stuff this inside our car, instead of having to attach it in to the roof of it. Its merely 1,40 meters long and 43 centimeters wide at its widest point. The sides are appr. 12cm tall and the nose is appr. 25cm high, and very curved to make it easy to "climb" on top of snow, so it would not dive in the snow as many ahkio´s sometimes do.

 Does not look so awlful to be junkyard material ?

I had some deciliter of wood-oil that i mixed with small amount of paint in juniper-named colour, it turned out to be pretty nice solution, and made the ahkio look a bit like camouflaged....i wish i would still had a hint of snow white paint, to make the ahkio two-tone, with gree & white in it. Well....you cant win everytime, with wallet like mine.

          Smoothed corners dont eat cord / bungee cords that fast and arent so vulnerable either.


All the important edges are rounded, as are the holes  too, and all the screws are in holes that i counter sunk at first, except for few screws that will be changed before use, but they will have reinforcings of sometype, similar to the ones that they now have....the snap button washers :). Good old trick.

I screwed in a few hooks inside the ahkio too, so i can use some cord or bungee cord with em, to ease the secure packing of ahkio. The tools used to make this are jigsaw, saw, puukko, drill, rasp, file,hammer, screwdriver,and thats about it, nothing special.

Thats about it for now, during next week i think i might get it all ready if the snow storms and winds dont interrupt our life too much as they do now.

Wood materials : 0 euros, allf rom trash pile.
Metal hardware, screws etc : 7.6 euros

All the rest from my treasure chest :)