Harbor Freight Tool Chest Caster Wheel Upgrade
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Hello everybody,
I'm upgrading the wheels on my harbor freight tools chest. This information will go beyond Harbor Freight chests along on to other brands. These are odd duck casters you cannot just go out and find a direct bolt-on caster like this. With a five inch by two inch wheel this would be a medium to light duty plate and the bolt pattern is one and three-quarter by around about three inches, but like I said, you cannot find them so don't bother looking.
So I'm going to be changing out the wheels and keeping the rest of the hardware. Now these wheels are just as cheap as they come and that's to be expected as a couple duck staffs. But this is the spanner bushing which in essence the bearing for this super thin super cheap. So I'm upgrading to a polyurethane wheel. Now don't just go out and grab any old polyurethane wheel that you can find because you need one that will help resist set. Polyurethane does not like standing loads meaning like a toolbox that doesn't move very often.
It will develop a set or in essence a flat spot and then over time when you go to roll it the next time you'll be bumping over the flat spots so a lot of the wheels. You just go out there and find they're going to be in a short a scale for their durometer hardness I purchased. A wheel that is in the D scale and this is a 55d so it's much harder than the a scale for reference. This is a Colston caster. This has a poly ethyl elephant polyolefin. Center say that five times fast if I set it right I don't know but just for reference. The model number or part number of this wheel is 5.0 zero or 5.92. Five that specific part number comes with a PP BB bearing that is a pedestal precision ball bearing the race sticks out the outside but it also extends to the midsection of the wheel. So when you put these bearings together you have a span. All the way across now I went with ball bearing as opposed to roller bearing one because they're maintena nce-free. They should roll very easily and that's my choice. Now I needed axles.
The axles that came with the Harbor Freight casters. They're around about a 3/8 of an inch. This is a half inch board so I quizzed them at the store and they gave me four axles for free. This hood here take them so you could use a half inch bolt. These axles have a grease zerk in the end and they're hollow up to here so if you did have roller bearings. This is how you would maintain them. You shoot your grease in there and it would lubricate the bearing. I don't need that but that came with them. Now for reference I paid 1385 per wheels so in essence fifty five dollars and forty cents plus tax was my cost. I sourced these out locally. You could probably call any material handling place in your area and they would be able to give you this wheel if you chose to go.
With it I'm hoping thatusing the 55d will resist any type of set but time will tell. But this is what I'm going with the modification. I'm going to need, to make is in the original forks on the Harbor Freight box. I'm going to need to drill this hole out and open it up to a half-inch to accept the new accident. They'll still be plenty enough meat around there. I wouldn't be concerned about doing that. So that's where I'm at right now. I need to pierce these holes. We're going to start loading these things up all right two down two to go.
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