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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
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