Four Questions That Decide Which Caster You Actually Need
A caster almost always fails long before the equipment it carries. The cart is fine. The rack is fine. But one wheel has seized, one swivel raceway is packed with grit, and now two people are shoving 800 pounds across a dock by leaning into it. The instinct at that moment is to read the part number off the old mounting plate and order the same thing again. Sometimes that is the right call. Just as often it guarantees the same failure in another eight months, because the original spec was chosen for a floor, a process, or a building that has since changed. Before you reorder, walk the route the equipment actually travels and answer four questions. It takes about ten minutes, and it accounts for most of what goes wrong with casters in the field. 1. What is the floor like, end to end? Not what the floor is like where the equipment parks. What it is like along the entire path, including the parts nobody thinks of as floor. Sealed concrete is the easy case. Almost anything rolls on i...