Thursday, December 31, 2015

A Check List To Use When Purchasing Heavy Duty Casters

By Edward Jackson


Functionality combined with strength and durability is essential for heavy duty manufacturing industries. Therefore, heavy duty casters must be able to offer service without failure or breaking. They should be made to meet specific applications needs. They have found their applications in the office furniture, carts, hospital bed, cranes and many other industrial applications.

The caster construction material is primarily responsible for giving its chief properties that are strength and durability. Steel made casters are the ones most preferred when it comes to the heavy duty applications since they can provide required weight carrying capacity, mechanical strength. Therefore, one should look for the caster made from the materials that can service the purpose required.

A caster can be either rigid, swivel or semi-rigid. Rigid casters incorporate a wheel mounted on a fork and the orientation of work or direction is fixed. The swivel casters have an added joint on the fork to enable them to rotate about the attachment in 360 degrees. Rigid caster machines are used in the heavy duty application to move objects since they are stable and easy to keep in control unlike the swivel ones that can be hard to control.

Caster fluttering is the rapid swaying sideways of the gear during movements. This oscillation can also be referred as shimmying. It occurs at certain critical speeds at which the wheels start to wobble. It is caused by weight and the distance between the axle and the steering axis or what is called trailing distance. A solution to this issue is getting the speed limits to the specific casters and its weight limits to avoid it going out of control when in use.

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.

Wheel diameter, size and their tandems affect the effectiveness and efficiency of the caster gear. The bigger the wheel diameter, the easier it gets for it to ride over uneven surfaces with the least effort and vibrations. One can also increase the weight carrying capacity by having tandems that tend to distribute the weight over bigger surface area.

The conditions of a caster use also comes into consideration since certain materials are with qualities might be not right for the particular environment. A good example is the steel tandems that might be affected by extreme moisture affecting their durability and performance. For the plastic based casters, the temperatures might render them inefficient thus one needs to consider the conditions of working before purchasing the casters.

Also the type of caster wheels are dictated by the type of surface or rail being used. When using rails, tapered casters wheels, v-shaped and u-shaped caster wheels are used. For the flat surfaces, flat caster wheels are employed and they can be padded ob tired. This is usually in a bid to reduce vibrations caused and damage to the surface or floor.




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