Body Dolly

The body is off to the blaster. The dolly survived the tow truck.

Front dolly on bus. Seems to be holding up. I may replace the 5/16 bolt on the swivel arm with 3/8. I am going to pull this dolly apart again to clean and paint it.

Mount complete with swivel and rotating sections

Mounts with swivel arms.

The frame mounts are almost done. This is the rotating mount. Next I will attach the forward back swivel. Why create such a complex mount? Two reasons; these mounts are height adjustable and they can be moved up serep incline such as a ramp.

First body dolly almost done. I still need to build the mounts.

I finished all the castor mounts.  I drilled holes for all the castors. Ended up using 5/8 drill bit to drill holes and ergo 5/8th nuts and bolts

These are the castor mounts tach welded. I did not want to fully weld the brackets until I complete assembly at least once. To be sure everything fits together.

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Also I chose to mount the front and rear dollies as separate units. They have the same design but with different mount points and mounts. I am designing for interchangeable mounts. See Below.

Rear Mount Points about 44" apart

Front Mount Point about 29" apart.

You can download this design here Body Dolly

Here is my latest design for the body dolly. It is a bit of a change but I think it is better, more efficient, easier to construct, cheaper, and should be just as strong. The primary question I am trying to resolve is what thickness of steel to use. I think 3/16 for the cross bars that connect the wheel caster supports. 12 or 14 gauge for the rest not sure about that yet. I am going to try to find some specs on the steel to try to get a better feel for it's strength. 

I have created some initial designs with Sketchup. More to come as the designs evolve.

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I have been having a mobility problem. Moving the bus body from my garage to a media blaster to a paint shop, back to my house, is a potential logistics nightmare. But I think I have a simple solution. A body dolly.

The body dolly needs to be versatile enough to load on to trailer move around the garage and move around and over obstacles. Oh yeah and safe. Plus being able to move this around and out of the garage takes some pressure off and allows me to do other stuff with my garage.

So being able to move around the garage is important and over small obstacles and also have some decent clearance. For this I chose 8" caster swivel wheels. These are available at harbor freight for 13.50 each.

Disclaimer: Build this at you own risk. I have not tested this and cannot vouch for the structural integrity of these designs. Also your craftmanship is a factor. If you intended to support a very heavy object, you should test this out before you do anything stupid. Like getting underneath a car with this as the only support.