There seem to be a hundred different versions of these things out there, and the general consensus seems to be that, even in the best case scenario, it is difficult to get a car moving unless all 16 wheels are pointing in the same direction before you start.
I started to think about the possibility of building a pair of large four wheeled dollies, each of which would support one end of the car.
Suggestions?
Less wheels means more weight per wheel. Good caster wheels are not super cheap.
cut down some HF furniture dollies - they're about $12/each.
I built my own using welded together unistrut and 16 industrial surplus casters. They work well. Yes it can be a challenge to get the car started going the direction you want; I just use a 2x4 as a lever under one of the dollies.
Making two big dollies might work but it would leave you with these huge things to store. Do you have a place to keep them?
I use the dollies for other things when they're not under a car - right now one is holding a motor, for example, and makes it easy to move the motor around.
We use the go jacks at work, they work damn well.
Woody, I would think two larger ones would have more difficulty turning or jogging the car off-axis
A few data points:
The HF furniture dolly wheels are awful for anything heavy. If you have 600 lbs on one and push it to change direction, the wheels kinda snap off. For a stack of tires or a small toolbox or something, they are great.
The HF car mover dollies with plastic wheels($59/pair) do fine, even on dirty concrete with joints and cracks, at least for a Miata-weight vehicle. 400-600 lbs/corner. At least for these wheels, changing direction is a little difficult, but they don't fall the berkeley apart when you try. I can move a Miata with 4 different direction changes (my garage SUCKS) without help. Just shove/wiggle/etc. and make sweeping direction changes when possible. Can even get it over a 1/4" lip by just lifting up on that corner and giving it a shove. I'm not particularly strong.
The car I built the dollies for was a 5000 pound ambulance/hearse. I wasn't going to stick it on a Harbor Freight dolly set that's for sure!
Go-Jacks rock! No need for a floor jack, a couple pumps lifts the tire off the ground. They roll so easily I have to chock them on a sloped garage floor. I also built special cribs that fit on top/lock in to the G-Jacks so I can have the car raised up in the air and rotate it end to end or move around the garage.
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I have been toying with the idea of using a skirted 12" x 12" piece of plywood with a skirt and then hook up 100 psi of air to make a car hovercraft. Would not get you far, but nice to tuck stored cars into a corner.
Kind of a GRM of this:
The go-jacks sound great but at $250/ea that's a steep barrier to entry.
I've had the HF Go-Jack knock-off's for many years and they've served me very well. Currently $99 each before you apply your choice of coupon.
In reply to Woody:
I have a set of the HF ones that I used with one of the of Europas, while the other car came with a large home-built 4-wheeled dolly(since it didn't have any rear suspension). Granted, neither of those may be the best to use for this comparison, but the large 4-wheeled dolly was much easier to move(although only 2 of the casters on it swiveled) than the 4 separate ones under each wheel.
It's all about the floor. A hard, smooth, level floor and i can roll a multi-ton jet engine on 4" steel wheels all by myself with ease.
If the floor is rough or soft the bigger the wheels need to be.
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