The Yokes
For me, the plowing yokes, more than almost anything else, defined a lot of my early months on the Island. I absolutely hated being on the yoke. As a Guardian, I unders
tood that the yokes were a useful tool and was a nesessity, but I still hate them. While I included some information on them in my book, on this page I am going to talk about the stuff that didn't fit in the book.
Yoke Construction
When we comisioned the artist to sketch the yokes, it sent us down quite a rabbit hole. We actually had to figure out what they were made of and how they were built to get the sketch done properly.
We described it as best we could, and then we sent girls in to hardware stores to look at different kinds of pipe until we happened across a 21 foot section of 1-1/2" schedule 40 black iron pipe. That pipe was not quite as heavy as a yoke, but it was the right size and it felt right in our hands.
Once we knew what the pipe was, we were sent to look at a pipe bending tool at Harbor Freight. While we didn't know what it was, we remembered that they had one of those things at the maintenance compound, and how it was made started to fall into place.
Christi had worked on repairing the padding a few times, so she was able to tell us about how the padding was done.
The Yoking Process.