Wednesday 30 December 2015

Guides To Follow While Buying 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.

There many materials in the modern day material science field that bare hardness, strength and durability in making products. There many metal alloys and plastics capable of making casters for heavy duty works. It is therefore true that the better the mechanical properties of a material, the better the caster will be. A good example is steel that is both strong and durable and can therefore make a strong and durable caster.

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.

Caster design improvements are important to making them more effective, efficient and improving on safety. These enhancements can be the toe guards to help protect being run over, steering and braking for better control, track wipes to ease movements and swivel locks to avoid derailing. Without the above improvements, they have been injuries reported after long use due to the vibration, back pains due to poor controls among other effects.

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.

There are several types of caster wheels found in the market. They are each specific to the surface of use. For example, a flat caster is to be used in flat surfaces. If there is flooring, the caster gear need to be padded or have tires. The tapered, v-shaped and u-shaped casters are used in railings. They provide movement in a straight line following the rails to move objects or carts.




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