Had a "I wonder ..." moment and am curious as to how historic (pre metal bearing) coaches and carriages fixed axles to rotate ? Wood-on-wood would surely scorch or burn, and leather would wear away ?
googling seems a tad underwhelming - probably because I'm using the wrong terms ...
Pre metal?
I thought metal came before the wheel. Wood on wood doesn't burn, it wears.
NT
you can get enough heat from wood on wood to ignite shavings and start a fire.
yes, with the right design and some determination. From a cart axle? no chance.
NT
Old spinning wheels used fatty bits of pork rind - I suppose that might work on coaches, too.
wood on wood and tallow grease for the bearings
Then you have metal shafts in wood bearings,EG boat shafts.
that isn't pre metal.
In the not too distant past, some washing machines had wooden bearings. I changed many of them.
Yes I was wondering that, maybe he thinks the Flintstones were real? Brian
If you look at many old carts you will still find metal parts. Not terribly sophisticated, but good enough for the purpose.
We have been giving horses shoes for a very long time, so blacksmiths have fashioned metal that long. Brian
You patently need to go back a long way for pre-metal civilisations. Try early* Egyptian. IIRC wood on wood sometimes with leather bushes packed with tallow to lubricate. Deep hub to spread load and reduce wobble.
*later they used metal sleeving
no
That of course is why literature abounds detailing wooden cart wheels and axles that caught fire.
I can assure you that wooden axles are not unknown even today in some parts of the world...
First wheel/axles is 6000 BCE - well before the bronze age.
Yes. But the OP asked about "historic" practice.
Do you have a source for that please as it's a lot earlier than anything I've seen or heard, or which is listed in the usual places?
was in wiki. ..... "The Halaf culture of 6500?5100 BCE has been credited with the earliest depiction of a wheeled vehicle.[3]
One of the first applications of the wheel to appear was the potter's wheel, used by prehistoric cultures to fabricate clay pots. The earliest type, known as "tournettes" or "slow wheels", were known in the Middle East by the 5th millennium BCE (one of the earliest examples was discovered at Tepe Pardis, Iran, and dated to 5200?4700 BCE). These were made of stone or clay and secured to the ground with a peg in the center, but required effort to turn. True (freely-spinning) wheels were apparently in use in Mesopotamia by 3500 BCE and possibly as early as
4000 BCE,[4] and the oldest surviving example, which was found in Ur (modern day Iraq), dates to approximately 3100 BCE.Evidence of wheeled vehicles appears in the second half of the 4th millennium BCE, near-simultaneously in Mesopotamia (Sumerian civilization), the Northern Caucasus (Maykop culture) and Central Europe (Cucuteni-Trypillian culture).
An early well-dated depiction of a wheeled vehicle (a wagon?four wheels, two axles) is on the Bronocice pot, a ca. 3635?3370 BCE ceramic vase, excavated in a Funnelbeaker culture settlement in southern Poland.[5]
The oldest known example of a wooden wheel and its axle was found in
2002 at the Ljubljana Marshes some 20 km south of Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. According to radiocarbon dating, it is between 5,100 and 5,350 years old. The wheel was made of ash and oak and had a radius of 70 cm and the axle was 120 cm long and made of oak.[6]In Roman Egypt, Hero of Alexandria identified the wheel and axle as one of the simple machines used to lift weights.[7] This is thought to have been in the form of the windlass which consists of a crank or pulley connected to a cylindrical barrel that provides mechanical advantage to wind up a rope and lift a load such as a bucket from the well.[8]"
Anyway wooden axles were the norm for centuries.
Thanks. Confirms my recollection: wheels for transport started c.3500 BC. (As Wikipedia goes on to say about the Halaf: "sometimes credited with the earliest depiction of a wheeled vehicle, but this is doubtful as there is no evidence of Halafians using either wheeled vehicles or even pottery wheels.")
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