Friday, January 1, 2016

Guides To Follow While Buying Heavy Duty Casters

By Edward Jackson


A caster is a simple wheel mounted on a fork so that the axis of the wheel rotation offsets slightly in relation to the mounting. The simple engineering concept helps the wheel to always be behind the shaft in respect to the direction of movement. Due to this ability to rotate or swivel around, it is possible to turn an object around its axis thus can be useful in cluttered spaces. The heavy duty casters have found their applications in the transport carts, aerospace building, ship and heavy industries too.

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 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.

The working conditions of a caster put to a limit and restriction of certain material and their service time. Exposure to chemicals and liquids calls for a caster that is inert and can work in such harsh conditions, more loading calls for more strong casters. Also the amount work dictates that the caster be of durable material in order to service the purpose.

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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