It’s that time of year again, mostly spent inside where it’s warm. That and the new year is kicking off with all kinds of “business” stuff to get done. There’s all the tax prep, market applications and market-season planning going on. While going through our big to-do list, I noticed that our annual re-inspection by the Minnesota Department of Agriculture is coming up in 6 weeks or so. Time to get cracking on a few projects.
One such project is putting some new casters on our egg refrigerator.
The egg fridge is a True GDM-7, a commercial refrigerator (as required by the MDA) that we take to farmers markets with us. For the past year I’ve had it on these 3″ casters. It lives in the farmers market trailer and we roll it out at each farmers market.
I love having the refrigerator out in front of our booth at farmers markets as it has really helped our sales. Even though we have pretty extensive sinage (if I do say so myself) you’d be amazed at the number of farmers market shoppers who don’t realize we have anything to sell. With the egg fridge at least passersby realize that we have something to sell, even if they think we only have eggs to sell. Getting a product out where customers can see it is awesome.
While I loved having the egg fridge on wheels, the 3″ casters were aggravatingly small. They didn’t work that well on anything that wasn’t perfectly smooth and the little “brake” on the wheels didn’t work very well. It went flying around the trailer a bit more than it should have (with no eggs in it thankfully).
I decided that some bigger wheels were in order this year. These 5″ wheels should roll a lot easier. Instead of brakes on the wheel, I’m going to bungee the fridge to the wall of the trailer when it’s in transit.
I made a lovely frame to bolt the casters to out of some 2×4, 1×4 and whatnot. This fridge came with four metal feet, the feet screwed in with a 3/8″ bolts. In our current arrangement the wooden frame is bolted to the fridge using 3/8″ bolts where the feet were. The big casters are then lag-bolted to the wooden frame. The old casters were screwed directly to the bottom of the fridge with sheet-metal screws. I was a bit nervous to go that route with the bigger wheels. I guess the manufacturers don’t get much demand for big-wheeled refrigerators.
That’s too bad, cause this bad boy wheels around like a dream! And it looks about a foot higher.
Now lets see what other stuff I have around to slap some wheels on…
