Firstly, I must apologize for getting sidetracked for quite some time with my posts. In October I signed a lease on a shared studio, and then realized that I was going to have trouble getting work done there, so after jumping through all the hoops to get out of that situation, I concluded that I would be better off doing office-work at
COOP in River North, and shop-work at our local Hackerspace,
PS:1. So just this Friday, I put in my first day at COOP, and got a delightful amount of work done, and then Saturday, I popped into PS:1, and got some prototyping done!
On the heels of my post on developing a more useful schlepping cart for urbanites, I am working on a re-do of the granny cart.
What you see here is just a functional form study, using cardboard from some old boxes, wheels off a discarded stroller, and some scrap aluminum trim. I based the box height on a grocery store cart, and realized that a lower height is necessary, but I like the handle height, so that will stay about the same. Lots of other things would be changed, such as ground clearance, and the depth of the box.
Priority one is that it be more durable, functional, and appealing as a means to convey your goods than the standard folding metal cart, that typically has a pretty short life due to crappy plastic wheels and rust-prone, flimsy metal. I want that criteria squared away first, then I will consider how to make it also do double-duty as a bike trailer.
But I am a firm believer in a variation of the
Pareto Principle, where typically 20% of your design constraints represent 80% of the obstacles to reaching a good design solution. That most difficult 20% may turn out to be trying to make the design collapsible, or it may be the attempt to make it a bike trailer too. I'm going to make a valiant attempt at achieving both, but I'm prepared to ditch one or both, in order to just get to a better-functioning cart.
