Great Lakes casters: lathe and bandsaw

[eyekode]

I have a small garage shop with some pretty big tools. All are on wheels except for my bandsaw (18" jet) and lathe (jet 1642).

The bandsaw I didn't really need on wheels but the lathe is a pain when turning bowls if I want to bring the headstock to the tail end to give more room to avoid hitting the ways with the tool handle.

I had heard great things about Zambus and Great Lakes is supposed to be a good lower cost option. So I ordered 8. With coupon code CM it came to about 110 shipped. Not bad!




Installing them sounded sooo easy. But I hit a couple road blocks. The first is that the bottom of my bandsaw is not solid. So I laminated some ply together to fill the voids:



From here I could just bolt them on with 13$ worth of M12x1.75 hardware:


The wheels are not that large but they really make it easy to move the bandsaw around!

I don't have to put all of the feet down either to make it stable.

However with my solution there is a little more wobble then without them. No big deal on a bandsaw. I am pretty happy with this solution!

 

[eyekode]

Now on to the lathe...
The lathe already had holes in the legs. But unfortunately they are too small . So I drilled and tapped them:


I am not particularly good with metal so that took me a while. I probably should have just drilled out the holes and skipped the tap.


The lathe is now very easy to move.


But I can't say I am as happy with the stability. With the feet down there is some noticeable wobble. And if you look at the design it is easy to understand why. I doubt the Zambus would do much better.

It may be more resistant to wobble with the feet up.

We will see if this ends up being a big deal or not with large/off balance bowls. I guess nothing beats bolted to the floor huh?
Salem