The Evolution of a Painting Cart
By Richard Hinson

When moving a painting of any size from one place to another it helps to have a specially designed cart to safely get the painting to its destination. Small paintings that can be carried by hand are susceptible to damage from excessive handling. Plus, there's additional risk from carrying the painting great distances. Small though it may be, when your museum spans the distance of several city blocks, hand carrying a painting isn't practical. And forget about the idea of hand carrying a small painting up stairs. It's just too risky. Large paintings can be too heavy to move without the assistance of a good cart. So where does one find a good painting cart? Can you look in your latest catalogue for the newest up-to-date model with rubber bumpers and large wheels? Well, maybe you've got that catalogue, but I've never seen any place where a good painting cart can be found. Every painting cart we use here at the museum, we've had custom-made.

We started with a basic design, four wheels and a platform with a solid, stationary wall to lean the paintings against when it was moved. Looking at the cart from its side it looked like an L with wheels on the bottom. We found this design to be adequate, but lacking in several things, like handles. I know that seems like a simple thing, but at the time we were designing it, that just never came up. Several things that seemed important at the time got eliminated, like a beeper that sounds when we are wheeling the cart through the museum. The beeper alerted everyone where we were. It annoyed them, too. That was the first thing to go.

So the next cart we had made we remembered handles. This was an improvement, but there were still some problems that needed attention. One was that we had so much confidence in ourselves and our ability to design a well-made painting cart that we forgot about gravity. It seems that if you put a really large, heavy painting on a seemingly well-designed painting cart no matter how much confidence you have in yourself, gravity will prevail. The wheels we chose weren't as confident in our abilities as we were, and failed. Since all the floors in the galleries were terrazzo and very smooth, we didn't think the wheels needed to be very large. Wrong. Before moving on to the next design, we put five-inch wheels on all the painting carts we had at that time.

This L-shaped cart allowed us to move only one painting at a time. This became important as our exhibition schedule increased. So now that we had a better understanding of what we wanted and didn't want, like handles and five-inch wheels, moving more than one painting at a time, we wanted a cart that would be a multi-tasker. What we needed was a cart that could be used to move more than one painting at a time. We decided on a radical move, to completely redesign the painting cart from the platform up. We decided that five-inch wheels would be the standard for all our painting carts and the handles should be placed low to help with lifting. The new design would place the rack, that's what we called it, the up-right part of the L) in the center of the platform, it would be taller, and it would no longer be a solid piece. (The new cart would look like an upside down T). This way paintings could be carried two ways on the cart, leaned against the rack on either side or through the middle leaning against each other. The first way we could move two large paintings, one on either side of the cart, the latter way we could move many small paintings by placing them between the uprights of the rack.

After several more attempts at cart design we finally came up with a good cart that holds any sized painting. Some older designs got modifications and others were discarded. The carts we now have fabricated can be used to move all two-dimensional framed objects no matter how large or thick. We have even used them to move chairs and medium-sized objects for some of our decorative arts exhibitions. See the drawings with this article to get plans for painting carts of your very own.

The drawings don't consider wooden materials. We don't use anything fancy. Standard 1" X 4", 2" X 4" and 3/4" plywood is all we use for the manufacture of these carts. We cover the entire surface with carpet. The carpet is attached to the wood of the carts by contact cement. A few extra days of drying time is needed to dissipate the off gassing from the contact cement. Some of our carts have wheels with brakes and others don't. There has never been a time when not having brakes has been a problem. In the ten years we have been using this design, we have had only minor peeling of the carpet and no serious accidents to our collection from equipment failure.

Images: Front View -
Side View -
Bottom View