Steve,
Very cool. I thought I was the only one thinking about this a lot. I have
to move everything I have at home a lot.
We have a pallet cart frame at work that is on heavy casters, but locks in
place with a foot pedal that, upon kicking down,
becomes a sort of stationary jack, that goes down, locks against the floor
flat, keeps the whole thing from moving.
If this is not in among these somewhere, I can take a pic of it sometime,
and post it. I'm not sure what the device is called.
-Andrew
On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 4:21 PM, Steven Owens <stevenjowens@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Guys,
I tried to explain this to Robert and Chad a month or two ago, but I
wasn't very coherent and I decided to just dig up a video that
demonstrated it.
I have a large garage, but I also have a lot of stuff in it, as those
members who have made it to one of my parties can attest. What's
especially tricky is that many tools require a lot of space around
them to give you room to move wood around. However, even using
locking casters doesn't give you the stability you really need for
accurate work.
I did a lot of looking into gadgets to solve this. Ultimately I came
to the conclusion that the best way is to have some device that lowers
the casters to directly contact the floor when you're not moving it.
My initial thought was to combine four cheap bottle hacks with casters
and bolt them to the legs.
There are specialty gadgets to do this (links below) but there's an
even cheaper approach.
With any of these approaches, I would also recommend adding some cheap
table leg levelers, since any table or tool you move around frequently
is going to need leveling.
There's a *super* simple version, but it requires a strong user; you
mount wheels on one end, so that when the table is sitting flat, the
wheels are 1/4" off the floor. When you lift the other end up, the
wheels come down and you can roll it around like a wheelbarrow. I
don't have a video of that approach and I don't especially advocate it
for hackpgh, but it is super simple to build.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF7EgoYJAqc
This is the really simple version, just brute force. You have to be
strong enough to lift the table so the stop-block can come down, but
it's really simple, really easy to build.
Then there are number of approaches that use leverage to lift up/push
down, ranging in complexity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SLEzHkM-zc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uymOUEOI-_w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=HENMh1FWtj0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMdKdglWMHo&feature=related
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RajKcEMV2jk
And just for some tool porn, here's a shop-built, all-metal version
that handles 400 pounds. Slick.
Commercial Options
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBjr_OANa-M
These casters from rockler are nice, supposed to be 400 pounds capable
(100 pounds per caster) and only $80 per set - hey, on sale for $60
per set!
http://www.rockler.com/workbench-caster-kit-4-pack?site=ROCKLER
However, in my experience, at least on *my* cracked and uneven garage
floor, using caster wheels this small is asking for trouble. It's not
just the cracks, but when a wheel gets caught in a crack you have a
high chance of applying too much lateral force to the caster and
bending it.
Shopsmith has a similar product for $97:
http://www.shopsmith.com/ownersite/catalog/markvcasters.htm
There are also much, much more expensive industrial casters with this
sort of feature, $150 per caster, etc. Obviously not an option for
us, but if you want some tool porn:
http://www.castersupply.com/NAV/leveling_casters.htm
Floor Locks
Floor locks are the opposite approach - instead of lowering/raising
the casters, lower/raise the feet. I think for DIY, it's more
feasible to raise/lower the casters for temporary use and have very
stable permanent feet, than vice versa. There are commercial options,
probably too expensive, but here are some examples:
http://www.mcmaster.com/#floor-locks/=1184gi4
--
Steven J. Owens
stevenjowens@xxxxxxxxx
puff@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
412-401-8060
