Wheels keep turning for historic cart

Cart yourself down to South Coast Restoration Society Inc. (SCRS) at Pimpama (QLD) where rundown historic machinery is given a new lease on life.

Handy homeowners from Stockland’s Halcyon Greens have joined SCRS and have recently completed restoration work on a wooden horse-drawn wagon that had been donated to the Society.

“It’s a general farm cart that might have been a merchant’s cart used to deliver goods house to house,” homeowner and hobby shed regular Ray Carter said.

“It’s just a general, wooden-spoked farm cart that is drawn by either a donkey or small horse,” he said.

“We don’t know the age of it, but it’s got to be in the vicinity of 100 years old.

“There’s nothing to identify it other than a couple of blacksmith marks that we couldn’t figure out whose they were or where they came from.”

A team of Greens homeowners set to work to restore the cart as the SCRS needed their expertise, with the restoration taking more than a year to complete.

“We had to learn the skills of a wheel wright,” Ray said.

“All the wheels had to be remade as none of the spokes or hubs were reusable, and it was the most difficult part of the project as none of us had attempted this before.”

Ray said the team managed to keep the steel tires, while most of the timber in the cart had rotted and had to be renewed.

“All the iron work was stripped back to bare metal and repaired for reuse,” Ray said.

Ray spent most of his career in heavy industries including chemical, power stations and mining after beginning his working life as an automotive apprentice – hence his love for restoring machinery.

“I spend a lot of time at the Heritage Society servicing and running machines from tractors to inline Blackstone diesel generators as there is a variety of equipment on display there,” he said.

“I started restoring when I was an apprentice – we had a 1927 Essex that my stepfather and I were restoring up until he died.”

Ray and his wife Chris (who is active in the Halcyon Greens craft group) came to the community looking for a better lifestyle to enjoy their hard-earned retirement.

“We both worked very hard long hours in our jobs because of the work we did, and now this is our time and we’re enjoying it the best we can,” he said.