Sunday, January 3, 2016

Guides To Follow While Buying Heavy Duty Casters

By Edward Jackson


By definition from the dictionary, a caster is a small wheel on a swivel attached under a piece of furniture or heavy object to make it easy to move. For the casters, they are designed for the toughest applications like ship and aerospace building many other heavy applications. Long life durability and strength is one criterion one should put into consideration while buying heavy duty casters.

Material used in the construction dictate the properties of the caster itself. If the strong and durable materials are used, a caster that has been engineered well would bare similar strength and durability. Therefore, it is important to get the casters made by the strongest and durable materials since they tend to offer the same when working with.

One should also consider if the caster to buy is a swivel or rigid. Swiveling is the ability for the gear to rotate on its axis over a few degrees to a whole turn. Rigid casters are more likely to be used in the heavy duty applications since they provide much steady movements. The swiveling comes in handy in some applications since they help ease movement in cluttered space for they can make easy turns.

Caster wheel wobbling is an effect caused from rapid side to side movement of the wheel during movement. It usually occurs at specific speeds and each caster wheel has its critical speed to which is starts to wobble. The wobble can also be referred as fluttering another contributing factor to the fluttering is the weight borne by the caster wheels. The heavier the load, the less the fluttering since it helps in stabilizing the wheels.

Long time operations and use of caster driven cars or carts can cause injurious effects to the user. Therefore, better research on improvement and enhancement has been one of the projects for the design engineers. This includes the improvement on caster wheel tires and padding, getting the best length of trailing offset to avoid fluttering, brakes and steering system to ease control. All these improvements are aimed to make the casters more efficient and effective in their applications.

The caster wheel size; diameter, width and tandems affects their efficiency and working. A wider width caster wheel has more load capacity since it can distribute the weight over a larger surface area than a narrow wheel. A bigger wheel diameter proves to be much better to use in the rough and irregular surfaces since it can be able to bridge easily over than smaller wheels.

Environmental conditions where a caster will be used also dictate the type of caster to buy. The type must be able to work with maximum efficiency with the least maintenance cost. In high temperatures and moist areas, any caster made of metal prone to rusting cannot be advised. In such areas, aluminum and thermal plastics that can stand high temperatures are more applicable. If there is chemical exposure, inert materials like plastics can be used to avoid casters made of reactive metals.

Lastly, when purchasing the caster, one should understand his or her requirements based on the type if surface or rail he is going to use. Flat surfaces call for flat padded or tired casters so as to reduce vibration and floor damage. For the rails, u- shaped, v-shaped and tapered are more preferred since they provide grip on the rail thus avoiding derailing.




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