# Electric Hand Truck



## electro wrks (Mar 5, 2012)

Here's a motorized hand truck I made in 2008, as posted on another thread. I haven't checked in a while, but there must be commercially made versions available. The big lawn tractor tires worked well on loose ground. You still needed to keep the load balanced with good upper body strength and this was a factor limiting the power-assist. But, the low power electric motor, from a recycled mobility scooter trans-axle, eliminated most of the pushing and pulling effort. It was a 24V unit run at 12V.

A speed controller (with reverse) from a cordless drill was attached to the handle. Construction involved some welding, metal fab, and machine work. The mobility scooter trans-axles show up on eBay occasionally. I'm not sure how you might hook-up a complete cordless drill. Maybe with a small chain or cog belt drive. The trans-axle I used had a differential for making tight turns. You would need to have something similar for a drill drive. 
Attached Thumbnails


----------



## samwichse (Jan 28, 2012)

Maybe you could look for a surplus electric shopping cart pusher like they use at places like Costco and Walmart and modify that? I'm sure there must be some around with bad batteries or some such.

These things:
https://youtu.be/anyQKXe_e2s


----------



## stringbender (Mar 31, 2016)

I let this slide for a while. Now it's time to get back to it. I'm including a link to a youtube video I created to provide more detail regarding what I am trying to accomplish. Please keep in mind, I have never done anything like this. I'm looking for very specific instructions regarding what to purchase and the easiest way to go about this. Thanks for viewing:
https://youtu.be/CCfkSXKpKUQ


----------



## Electric Avenue (Jul 11, 2016)

Can you explain exactly how that will cut your workload in half? I'm trying to understand how an electric cart could help you in this fashion.


----------



## stringbender (Mar 31, 2016)

Easy, first of all I have to push the cart loaded with all my gear up a rather steep incline. Next I have to load everything on the truck. Then when I get to the gig I reverse the process. I have to unload the truck and put everything on the cart and push it inside. After the gig, it's the same thing in reverse order. I push the cart to the truck, load the truck, put the hand cart in the truck, get back home, unload the truck, push it to the basement. Hopefully now you can see how having an electric hand truck that I load up and drive into the bed of my truck would greatly reduce the workload that I have for each gig.


----------

