Make a Wooden Sled — the Old-Fashioned Way

An ideal first project for working with green wood.

This little sled is a perfect introduction to the age-old tradition of working green wood. Building it is a completely satisfying experience, from beginning to end: you start by cutting down a tree and end by playing with kids in the snow.

Along the way, you’ll learn how to split wood along its grain, how to handle a drawknife, how to use a shaving horse, how to steam-bend wood and how to make copper rivets. That’s a lot of new skills to learn in one project, but the sled is so small (it’s sized for a toddler), and has so few parts, that you can easily afford to mess up now and then, pick up the pieces and keep moving on.

To be honest, I’m new to green woodworking. I built a pair of snowshoes last year, and this was my second project. I still have a long ways to go to master the art, but this project really…