Actually, I’m not making them. I modified a surveying tripod for my customer to use casters on it for rolling around buildings when laser scanning them. He has said it has saved his crew countless hours of taking it all down to move it a few feet, or scooting it across the floor trying not to topple the $80k scanner to the floor. But, it’s been almost a year and the casters are wearing so they have a lot of slop in the swivel. I still have one of the casters that I kept as a spare and it has some slop to begin with, but he says it has gotten exponentially worse in the past couple weeks. I’m guessing some of the ball bearings have fallen out as it has worn, and it’s a snowball effect after that. So, I’m modifying another set of casters to have a precision swivel. No big deal as far as the fabrication goes. I’ve got the CAD done and am ready to make parts.
The fun part is going to be the new thing for me. I’ve anodized aluminum parts before (not hard anodizing, which is much more chemical-intense) but I’ve never zinc plated before. Similar, but easier process, so it should be interesting to see how it goes. I’ll yellow chromate the parts after. No interesting pics yet, but here’s one of one caster almost completely disassembled.
Dave
