This discussion brought back a memory of something I was gonna do about 10 years ago, but never did...
Myers Cycle Engineering, an independent shop in Kensington MD has been around as long as I can remember. Small space, so he is well organized. He has a bunch of Handy lifts, and he put casters on all of them. If a bike was disassembled waiting for parts or customer authorization*, he could just push it up against a wall, and pull another bike out into the open space to work on it.
- Myers' Mobile Handy lift
- myers.jpg (81.48 KiB) Viewed 5888 times
Here's a picture from his website. You can plainly see two casters attached to the side of the table. When the table is lowered, table and casters are sitting on the ground, and the scissor-legs of the lift are off-the-ground. Thus, easy to push around in any direction. Once the table is raised, the scissor-legs are solidly on the ground.
Great! But how do you keep the lift from moving around when you're loading or unloading a bike? The photo shows another ground-contact thing just forward of the rear caster, but I can't figure out what it is from the photo. I'll have to call or go up there and see if he will let us in on his secret, maybe get a better photo.
MEANWHILE - The challenge: what is the "Secret Ground-Contact Thing", and how can we fabricate an equal - or better - one?
* I was an automobile mechanic in the 1970s, and a significant obstacle to to making a fortune was what to do with partially-disassembled cars waiting for either customer authorization to proceed, or parts delivery, or both. It was Murphy's law. If you reassembled the car and parked it in the parking lot (possibly pushing it there), the authorization (or parts) would come minutes later. If you left it sitting disassembled on the lift, you'd never hear nothin' from nobody, and the carcass would tie up that lift all day long.