Thread: Do lockable castors really work?

If you get decent 3 or 4 inch double lock (Wheel and swivel locks) industrial castors, and the unit has a decent amount of weight, and the floor is smooth but not slippery, two swivel castors and two fixed direction castors or four swivel if you really need to cope with movement in all directions should be OK for making equipment mobile, but I personally prefer a workbench to be sitting directly on the floor, but I have a walkie stacker fork to move mine if need be.

Main issue is having enough load on the castors to maintain wheel grip to allow the brakes to work. Obviously need to have all wheels on the floor and fairly evenly loaded. Another issue is being able to access brake set/release mechanism properly in any parked position, often they end up under the cabinet/frame and hard to access.

Hi John G

I have them on my home made router table - see below - and work OK.

...same here, the grey rubber lockable ones as opposed to the hard nylon ones work fine but yes there is a bit of weight to keep it all stable.

I am using the two lockable castors and two standard wheels for the home made thickness planer stand. They work well but that is not putting much pressure on the castors as you might expect.

I have four lockable grey rubber wheels on everything, and they work a treat.

With four lockable castors, I usually find that if the bench or machine is against a wall, I usually lock only the front castors, as I am too lazy to lock the rear ones.

The more mass the better, however, you need to get better quality castor which have better swivel design.

The brakes essentially applies a force to the tread of the wheel and its material (usually rubber or polyurethane) determines how effective the brake is. When examining any castor, apply the brake and try force rotaing the wheel by hand, this will tell you how efective the brake is.

In the case of my workbench I can remove the castors. Most the time the castor platform is engaged. When planing, I only need to lock one or at the most two of the front castors.
Zelk

These are the lockable casters I'm installing on my thickness planer cabinet. They are the same as the 4 I've got on my mobile work centre.

I've been ripping, cross-cutting, dadoing, rabbeting, routing, sanding and assembling things on this since the day I reassembled the saw and the most I've ever had to lock was one caster at each end and I'm not even sure I needed to do that!

Guys, thanks so much for the responses.
Some really clever ideas. Amazing how many variations there can be to the solution to mobile platforms.

John G
Have a look at Stevemc32's idea to a way around lockable castors brilliant idea he has
heres the link to his thread.https://www.woodworkforums.com/f213/sort-workbench-wip-slow-97325
Sorry if im too late for the replie.
Harrison

Or you could try this method for a mobile base.. [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=122w40ZBrJg"]YouTube - Table saw mobile base[/ame]

How come theres no sound in the Vidio?
Harrison

Originally Posted by Harrison

How come theres no sound in the Vidio?
Harrison

You may need to update your Flash player..

I like that one but there's a lot of parts to it.

Originally Posted by John G

I've always been suspicious. How solid are these lockable castors really? e.g. if you were using it on a router table, would the vibration make the table shift?

Got them on my router table and assembly table and once locked down they don't budge.

I've put 4m of 100mm x 100mm merbau post through the r/table and it didn't move a bit.