I want to follow up on this.
The cart is fantastic. No two ways about it. It makes open carts look obsolete and poorly designed, which I guess they are. It's a blast to use. I didn't even have to put cable hooks on it, because all the wires and things drape over the bottles. Hooks would make it worse, not better.
Anyway, I am now making another cart for my plasma cutter and older MIG. I am correcting two mistakes I made with the first cart, and one involves safety.
The first cart I made is no wider than the chest it was made from. The casters under the bottle touch the floor about 20" apart. This is fine in a shop with a flat floor and relatively few clumsy idiots, but once you put it on a slope or let a klutz get near it, tipping becomes a possibility. I am fixing this by widening the wheelbase on the new cart.
The old wheelbase is a rectangle, and rectangles like to rock, so they are easy to tip. I decided to make it a trapezoid with the long side under the bottles. The casters under the bottles will be around 8" farther apart than they are on unmodified chests. Trapezoids don't like rocking or tipping. Since I realized this, I have looked at carts designed by engineers, and I noticed they make their bases the same way.
The old wheelbase is unnecessarily long, and long wheeled things are harder to turn in small spaces. I realized I didn't need a long wheelbase, so I'm cutting it several inches on the new cart. Instead of having the casters all the way out front, they will sit directly under the bottles.
This will leave about 3" of 11-gauge plate hanging out unsupported, but it's more than strong enough. The bottles are flat on the bottom, so they don't exert disproportionate force on the unsupported plate, and the overhang is short, so it's pretty stiff to begin with. Overbuilding is bad design, and leaving the rails long would have made widening the wheelbase a lot harder.
Once again, I am using tubing spacers with holes to lift the chest off the rails. Last time, I went to a lot of trouble making spacers exactly the right height. This involved a lot of cutting, and it didn't improve the cart. This time, I just used 4"-long sections of tubing without reducing their height. This cart will be about 3/8" taller than the other one, which is meaningless. I should have done it this way last time.
Hope this information is useful to other people who build carts.
- 07 05 22 red harbor freight welding cart base welded together inverted 02 small.jpg (266.27 KiB) Viewed 9998 times
- 07 05 22 red harbor freight welding cart base welded together standing no paint small.jpg (273.57 KiB) Viewed 9998 times
I was socially distant when social distancing wasn't cool.
