On Carts Or Skids

Now this one vexes a lot of people... when you are restoring an engine and plan to show it, do you mount it on skids or on a cart? Personally I prefer a cart for showing, but when I'm working on and storing my engines I prefer skids. Difficult question, carts certainly make them easier to load and unload at shows, but take up an enourmous amount of room both when transporting and storing. Of course you can make a cart to be not much bigger than the engine without losing any stability and my friends Larry and Ken Evans have built some great steel carts which are very manouverable and easy to use. If I made carts like theirs I'd probably put everything on carts but I am a lazy bugger!

With a big engine, I like to see it on a big cart with big period wheels, I have my 4hp Southern Cross PB (fig. 1081 engine) mounted on a cart whose wheels used to be on a rig for taking power poles to a job site in the 1920's. The cart weighs almost as much as the engine and barely fits in my 6x4 trailer which means if I take the SC I cannot take anything else to a show. The trade off is looks vs. practicality!

With smaller engines, mounting them on a small steel cart with steel wheels does not detract from the engine. I really hate to see a cart with large modern rubber tyred wheels or casters - they just look like crap and they detract from the engine. The large rubber wheels do make the engine MUCH easier to move around and one method I've seen, is a gent who had the pneumatic wheels on the cart, but removed them once the engine was in place - this made his display both easy to move and look good for the show.

George Best asked:

If you have model engines or Maytags, this isn't much of an issue.

But as the size of engines go up, so does their weight. When you get past the 1-1/2hp size engines, you're often at a size beyond what two people can lift without straining something.

In the past few years I've leaned more and more towards having engines on carts. Carts have a few advantages that I like. On my concrete shop floor the engines on carts are very easy to move around. Also when I go to a show the engines on carts can be loaded/unloaded from my trailer without having to track down the forklift driver who is always busy and usually hard to find.

Comments?

George

Arnie Fero responded:
Duh... No brainer. I have one engine on a skid at present; a Light-Six
Sandwich (talk about an oxymoron). And that's only because the buzz saw
rig it goes on is waiting to be restored and I'm still looking for a
clutch pulley. Damn thing is one heavy pain-in-the-ass to load and
unload.

All of my show engines are on carts. Another comment on carts is to
design 'em so that they can be steered and so that the steering wheels can
either pass under the cart frame or through it. If you design a cart with
fixed axels, make up a steering dolly like Andy French made for his
Ruston-Hornsby. Wrestling an engine on a cart that can't steer is almost
as bad as one on a skid.

My final comment is to watch the length of unsupported axels. See April
2003 in the SEL Calendar for additional details. 8-))

See ya, Arnie

Arnie Fero

Pittsburgh, PA
feroa@venus.pgh.wec.com

and Bill Pfieffer concurred:

I even have some of my little stuff on carts!

Sure makes it easy to load and unload.  Specially when you got a bad
back.

Only drawback to a cart is the added height.  We have a Suburban, so
only certain engines get to go to Portland. 8-(

William J. Pfeiffer Jr.,
Sharon A. Cook,
Freckles the gutless wonderdog &
Sugar the tongued terror

rusty_iron@ameritech.net
Woodstock, Illinois, USA

This article is part of the Stationary Internal Combustion Engine Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). This series is a combination of my views and knowledge and the views and knowledge of other people - most of them members of the Stationary Engine Mailing List (More info on ATIS). Those articles which were written by others are © Copyright to the author. Those articles written by myself are © Copyright to Paul Pavlinovich.

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Last modified Sunday, 20-Jul-2003 15:28:00 BST

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