Cart Issues A-Plenty
Our landscaping/service cart is an indispensible piece of equipment for the park. It is used extensively, and without it it would be impossible to get so much work done each week.
However, it is running into problems. The issue is that our cart is not really a service utility/landscaping cart designed for hard use. It is just a regular golf cart designed to carry two golfers and two bags of clubs.
The bed was attached in an effort to make the golf cart more usable as an utility cart, but it wasn’t designed for this. The bed is cantilevered way off the rear of the golf cart, and any weight placed in the bed is completely behind the rear tires, instead of being centered over them. Considering that a regular golf cart is only designed to handle 500 lbs (which includes riders, accessories, and cargo), this presents some issues.
The hub assemblies, axles, and leaf spring suspension are all overloaded, and endure added stress from the cantilevered bed. As a result damage keeps occurring, forcing us to spend money on expensive repairs.
Since I’ve taken over, I have had to spend $1500 repairing hub assemblies, axles, and beefing up the suspension. And before I took over, there were several other repairs.
At this point, any money we saved by not buying a proper utility cart in the first place is being eaten away by the repairs necessary to keep it running.
I have attached some photos to help illustrate the problems. If it becomes necessary to sink even more money into our cart, we may have to consider buying a proper utility cart instead of throwing good money after bad.
A proper utility/landscaping cart has a payload of at least 1000-1500 lbs, and has a heavier duty suspension with at least three leaf springs instead of two. If we have to buy another cart, that is what we will look for.
Hi David, I just wanted to say thank you for the new website and the great news articles. Great job!
You make some good points about the maintenance cart. How much will a new one cost? Do we have the money for that?
Thanks to you and the whole board.
Andi
Thanks, Andi. A new cart ranges from $14 to $18,000. That’s for a heavier duty cart that can handle the service demands. We are keeping an eye on our current cart, as far as maintenance costs go. If we have to keep putting a few hundred dollars into it every few months, we just may have to upgrade. It would be nice to keep our current cart, though, as a back-up that could be used by volunteers to do light duty work like pass out flyers, collect plastic bottles and aluminum cans, and other projects around the park. It could be very handy for that. It would be a shame to run it so far into the ground we couldn’t get light duty use out of it for many more years. So we are watching things carefully. We have funds budgeted in the future for a new cart. If you go to our online documents and read the Trower report you’ll see an estimate for about 4 more years of expected life. So money is being budgeted for it, but we’ll see how it goes.