At one point doing something around the farm I came across an iron wagon wheel and asked Matt if I could use it to make a wheelbarrow.  My memory is that it was 28" in diameter.  It had a 2 inch hole in the center so I went and found a sappling just over that size, cut it down and shaved it down until it just barely slid through the hole and voila, I had an axle.  At the time, I had a greenhouse in the back yard, but it wasn't in a spot that I could easily drive to (if it'd been raining that part of the lawn got really soft).  So mygoal was to be able to carry lots of flats to the pickup truck every Fri Night/Sat morning (and then back on Sat afternoon after the market).  Since I had worked out a system in my pickup truck (with a snazzy cap thanks to Leonard spotting it on a lawnup in Pittsfield with a free sign on it) where I could have several layers of flats (in order to carry more) I figured that designing that feature into my wheelbarrow as well made sense.  So I built a "bin" around myaxle and wheel framework on top of about a 10-12 foot long pair of 2x10s (or something close to that) which Matt had donated to the cause from his sawmill (probably when I mentioned that this was a project that would hopefully keep me from driving on the lawn).  So I now had a good 8 foot flat deck of plywood (the ends of the long support boards I cut down to just 2x2 at the handles and rasped off the corners to round them.  As I recall, they were a little wide (maybe 3' apart or so) but with my deck and sloping front section complete I was really psyched as I could easily pick up the wheelbarrow and roll it around without too much effort (it wasn't light, but I wasn't weak either).  So next I built sides on my wheelbarrow (again with 2xsomethings just acting as rails and also some going up higher like posts in the middle and at the back).  Once I'd added on that much more lumber it was getting heavier (and harder to pick up and maneuver, but still not too awful (there were nagging doubts about my choice of scale, but with testosterone (instead of logic) I managed to suppress them).  So I was really psyched and couldn't wait for the market, so I filled up the bottom deck of the wheelbarrow with flats and took it around the yard for a spin.  It was pretty heavy, but I could handle it, so I added on another layer of flats on an intermediate plywoodlayer that I placed across the rails.  Now it was really starting to get heavy enough that I was wondering if this was even at all workable.  But of course my design allowed for another sheet of plywood to be added on top of the posts to provide a 3rd layer of flats on top.  At this point it was really getting tough to pick up.  I could do it, but it was really really hard to move forward (especially if it was up hill) with that much weight in my hands.  So that first week, I think loaded up the truck by taking partial loads (with only 2 layers of flats) and while that probably would have worked out fine, I couldn't avoid a sense that I'd failed.  I mean, I had built this giant wheelbarrow and it worked and all, but I had designed it in a way that *should* work, but I just wasn't quite strong enough to use it that way. So I looked at my design and decided that I could mount a pallette  as a counter-ballance off the front of my wheelbarrow.   I mean, who would ever  try to "dump" a 12-foot long wheelbarrow anyway, you'd have to be 10 feet tall to have the leverage to do that anyway so it's not like it would be  getting in the way up there in the front. The obvious brilliance of the idea was that it would not only solve the problem, but I could get another 4 flats on the pallet, and if I put the heaviest flats (of the largest plants in 8-packs or whatever) I would be improving on the total capacity of the wheelbarrow (I think from 20 to 24 flats that I could carry at once).   And it worked.  Sort of.  After I'd mounted the pallet, I loaded it up with as many flats as I could possibly get on it and found that it wasn't actually that bad.  The counterbalance idea worked great and I was actually picking up a lot less weight with my hands (because more of it was on the wheel).  But there were several problems.  First  of all, the mass of the loaded wheelbarrow  had now been increased even more.  I found that it was almost impossible to get it started rolling (but once it was rolling I could manage to keep it rolling by really throwing everything I had into leaning into it and using the momentum to my advantage).  It was slightly uphill from the greenhouse to the truck, and bynow there was enough weight that when the soil was wet, it wasn't that much better than actually driving across the dirt (as I did compress it pretty significantly wherever I pushed a load).  Fortunately the profile of the wagon wheel was quite wide (and perfectly flat with no tread at all), so if I was careful I could go 1 track width over each successive time I came back and not leave much in the way of identifiable tracks (certainly no ruts like the truck tires would have left.  The other problem was a tougher one.  The thing is, I thought I was being clever with my physics with the counterbalance idea.  But I was pretty lame with my engineering, because I neglected to account for "twisting"forces from one end of the wheelbarrow to the other.   I think I only had a catastrophe once, but while grunting and groanding to get my fully loaded wheelbarrow moving (and then keeping it moving) I totally missed that I would be applying pressure unevenlyto the two handles.  That is, in order to turn or get up the hill I may have had to lean harder on the left one while pushing.  These uneven forces had tendency to propagate through the (somewhat elastic) structure of my wheelbarrow and send the loaded counter-balance pallet swaying back and forth.  At a certain point, the twist became so severe that it wouldn't rock back (and the pallet would just keep leaning and dump those 4 flats up there off on one side or the other).   Anyhow, I used this wheelbarrow not just for flats, but for all kinds of things (rocks, lumber, whatever).  I always took any opportunity to transport flats to the truck or back as a personal challenge to see how many flats I could carry in a single trip.  When we moved away the wheelbarrow stayed behind (it never even occurred to me to ask Matt and/or Allison for that wagon wheel, and without it my wheelbarrow wasn't much use). Tom (or maybe Debbie) upon seeing it commented that it looked like it ought to belong to Paul Bunyan (which made me proud, I think Iwant a blue ox too).