Hi Amy (and all)
One thing that’s sometimes overlooked in choosing/designing trolleys is that they have to work well as vehicles, as well as everything else. So you need something that’s easy to push along, and which will roll easily over all the floors in your museum as well as fitting through doorways and into lifts and whatnot.
You need to have handles that are at a convenient height to push on, to avoid back problems, and the handles need to be made so that your knuckles are safe from door frames as you push the trolleys through them.
There’s no real substitute for testing a prototype in the setting it will be used, but if the trollies are to be moved over any distance you need to have decent size wheels with proper bearings - I’d suggest that 80 mm castors are as small as you should go.
Having a pivoted castor at each corner, like a supermarket trolley, will make the thing very manoeuvrable, but will also give it all the other infuriating characteristics of these beasties, so a solution with two fixed castors and two swivel castors may be better. If you go for this option you need to remember that the thing is best pushed from the end with the swivel castors. And long thin trolleys with castors behave rather differently from short, fat ones.
And don’t forget that you need brakes or some other reliable arrangement to ensure that the trolley stays put until you want it to move!
Hope this helps
Good luck - perhaps if you do light on a good design for these things you could share it with this list, as the trolley question keeps popping up.
All the best
Richard Ellam
Richard Ellam
L M Interactive
Science Shows and Hands-On Stuff
[log in to unmask]
www.lminteractive.co.uk
On 4 Nov 2016, at 14:33, Amy Cameron <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> We are just about to go out to source mobile learning ‘trolleys' for our new galleries at the National Army Museum.
> We’re already hoping to keep them small and sturdy enough for proper portability, but I was hoping I could ask for expert advice from all of you.
>
> I just wanted to check with everyone out there in GEM if you have:
> - recommended suppliers, of either off-the-shelf or purpose-built trolleys
> - examples of trolleys that combine storage and display effectively
> - any ‘lessons learned’ - things which sounded great on paper but which didn’t work out so well in the real world!
>
> Any help would be much appreciated, and of course I’ll circulate responses for those who are interested.
>
> Thanks, in hope,
>
> Amy
>
>
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