The Dirty Secret of Big Yokes

Pssst, here's a little secret about yoke building:  It's a necessary evil.  Oh sure, you can buy yokes, but for the most part, a teamster needs to make some yokes.  Yet, making them is no fun.

Carving one yoke isn't bad.  I'm jealous of the students in Oxen Basics each year.  As beginners, they get to build a 5" or 6" yoke.  Once, an intern at Tillers even made a 3.5" yoke for her Dexter heifers (It looked like a yoke for the wall of a doll house.)  Those can be fun to make- at least once.

Training yokes are small.  They can be carved with hand tools in a few hours, but more importantly, you can pick up the blank as you work and turn it around to get a better angle on things.

Plus, that first yoke feels like a project.  You start. . . you finish.  After that, though, each yoke just feels like "the next one."  And as they get bigger, moving and turning yoke blanks resembles helping your college friends move a couch up a flight of stairs.

Carving a big yoke- say, a 10" or 11"- requires removing a lot of material.  If it doesn't look like a yoke, it's got to go.

I have an 11" Elm blank I'm working on.  I started it last year (2017) in Oxen Basics with drilling the bow holes.  Using a timber boring machine, Tom Nehil and I each drilled 2 holes.  My shoulders were plenty sore from that, and helping with 6 students building yokes that week, that was as far as I got.

Tom Nehil making the Elm chips fly.

This year, I used a chainsaw to cut relief cuts in the blank with the idea of eventually bandsawing it out.

Ed Nelson changed this process when he brought out a few hand adzes he'd made.  Tom and I then spent some time chopping away with the various adzes.  Then, Tom brought in a small broadaxe he rehandled and we chopped a little more.

By the end of the week, the blank had a decidedly "yoke-like" shape and I took it home to continue the process.  Stay tuned for more chip-making, along with a suggestion or two for speeding up the drudgery.