The Building of an Ox Yoke

The building of an ox yoke is a fun and timely proses. The first question should be, what kind of yoke do you want to make?  Do you want a good looking but weak timber yoke or a rugged and stiff heavier laminated yoke? Another thing that needs to be considered in building a yoke is what size and style. There are two types of yokes, a neck or head yoke and there's benefits to both. But there is only one that is really good and in my personal opinion it's the neck yoke because you can use it for more than one team of steers and a head yoke you can’t. A head yoke is specific to one team of steers because it sits on the horns and no two steers  have the same horns. There's a couple other styles but those are the main 2 the other 2 are the slide yoke and the single ox yoke. The single ox yoke is self explanatory but the slide yoke isn’t but let me explain something new. The draft of the yoke it's pretty much how much the yoke rolls on the animal well pulling. A slide yoke is another way to adjust the draft but otherwise it’s just a neck yoke. 

The yoke can be made out of lots of different trees like maple, yellow birch, black birch, beach and pretty much any hard wood. Once you have your wood picked out and you know the size of the animals then start building. When I built my first yoke I was always thinking, how would it look with the finish or if I was rounding the edges enough. Because if I didn't round it enough it would be uncomfortable on my steers. But once I was done and had the yoke finished and was outside with the melange of the ring in the staple moving, the chain shaking, the wind through the trees and the sound of the yoke being stressed that was enough to make me think that the knowing I built it, made me care more about it. I sometimes wonder what the steers prefer in a yoke but sometimes I think that they are wondering about why we do what we do.