Hi Dave, My 4 inch steel casters on my PM1440GT push around pretty easy. They may be more like your pallet jack casters for pushing? Anyway, in my case there would be just enough room for a pallet jack to fit in my room in front of the lathe if I remove some stuff but not enough to move room to pull the lathe out and then remove the pallet jack.
I looked at your pictures.... so clean..and neat. Envy! I also see wooden stairs, is your shop in a basement? Walkout? What I am really curious about is the flooring. It appears to have a strange texture... is this tile, concrete, paint? I have a bare concrete floor in a 1930 house walkout basement. The floor slopes downward over an inch from the spindle casters to the tail stock casters! It seems it was poured like this so the water can drain to a floor drain when water leaks in at a wall! Does not happen often, but sometimes I see a little, very slow, stream after a very hard rain or wet season. So it actually is sometimes, but rarely, wet under the lathe! Not good, but is what I have to work with. The concrete sits on clay, but is quite strong and has very few cracks in it. The clay probably gets wet and shifts around a bit under the concrete. Initially I worried a bit about the machinery weight on the clay, but then the whole house of brick, block, stone, and a big slate roof sits on the same clay, but with footers. I have thought about painting the floor with epoxy, but that would require I get everything out so that the floor could be sanded really clean and roughened up. Maybe in the next life time.
Dave L.
It's David ---- Dave is my father.
Sorry to the OP for hijacking his thread. But here goes.
Yes, my pallet jack casters are about 3.5" diameter, but what really matters for roll-ability is the hardness AND their width. I've experimented with lots of casters - everything in my shop is movable in some manner, whether it's by a caster on the machine/tool-chest or via the pallet jack. So I've experimented with lots of caster types. For something 2,000 pounds, the caster needs to be be as wide as it is tall - that's the issue with the Carrymaster locking casters/leveling feet. They can certainly take the rated weights, but they are difficult to wheel around because the caster element is so narrow.
As for my shop, you can take the
full tour here. I did several things to this basement when I bought the house 10 years ago. First, I added a separate entrance for egress of equipment and supplies. I build custom kitchens and needed an ongoing way to move flats of plywood into the basement and get finished cabinets out. Obviously I also needed a way to get heavy equipment into and out of the shop as well. So I cut a hole in one of the shop walls that's about 6-feet wide and built a separate entrance. It's essentially a concrete box on the exterior of the shop with a bulkhead door - similar to what they'd call a "storm" entrance to a basement back east, except it has no stairs. You can see that in this photo lowering my PM-935 into the basement, and is discussed a bit more in the first two minutes of
this video:
There's a whole series of photos that explain how I got my PM-1340GT into the basement
working alone here. And you can see what move-in day was like when I unloaded an entire 48-foot flatbed and moved into the shop originally
here.
My basement floor has an 11-inch difference in height from one corner to the opposite corner, so the floor had to be leveled. I didn't think about this until all my woodworking equipment was in the basement, but I decided it had to be level, and I didn't want to be standing on concrete for lengthy periods anyway.
As you will see in the photos at that last link, the floor in my shop is 1-1/8" T&G commercial-grade plywood (the same stuff used in high-rise construction as form material for concrete slab floors). I put down pressure-treated stringers, each cut and profiled to yield the exact same distance from the top of the stringer to the bottom of the floor joists above (which are level). Cutting the stringers was the most labor intensive part of the job. The stringers were put down 16-inches on center bedded in construction adhesive using a Ramgun and explosive nails into the concrete floor. Over the stringers is an oil-impregnated felt as a vapor barrier, then the T&G plywood went down over that and nailed in place with 8d galvanized.
The finished floor left me with 84" of headroom AFF to the joist bottoms above. This headroom limited my choice of mills to the PM-935 (I would have prefered a Haas VM-2). This photo was taken in the process of the floor installation to give you an idea. Since my equipment was already in the basement, this new floor was done in sections 1/3rd at a time, repositioning equipment as I went.
Once installed, the plywood floor was painted - two epoxy primer coats, then 3 polyurethane porch paint applications. The paint has held up well, but with glue drips from the woodworking activities and the stains from welding and machining, was looking pretty tired after 10 years. Plus the mill swarf under my feet while milling did a number on the floor in that area until I invested in floor mats. So during the Covid-lockdown, I sanded down the floor using a hand-held 4" wide belt sander (talk about back killer), moving every machine in the shop at least two times, and mopped down two fresh coats of the polyurethane porch paint. At 72 years, this was not my idea of fun, but I'm glad I did it.
My mill and the lathe are both sitting on aluminum riser-blocks that I machined specifically to fit in 4" holes in the plywood floor and are epoxied to the concrete slab below - these riser-blocks give me a solid platform at the four corners to level the machines and have them solidly connected to the concrete floor.
There's tons of more detail on my Flickr
blog here.
