Forgot to write a blog post last week because I was gone at the Regional Science Fair. A quick summary for what happened last week. We got the shopping cart back from metal fab after they welded the support bars in and they work great. There is absolutely no bending in the bars anymore which is good.
But then another issue showed which was the increased body roll. The reason that the shopping cart would experience such body roll was because the bearings in the pillow blocks would roll to allow for some body roll for cornering. However due to the shopping cart being so top heavy the roll is made significantly worse. We stopped it by adding a very simple anti roll bar which acted to tie the two steel tubes together so they didn't rotate independently but rather in tandem to reduce roll.
So then this week I worked on adding a door to the shopping cart because it was virtually impossible for anyone to get in the shopping cart alone without someone else there to hold the cart down. The idea for the door was very simple it was just going to be cutting out a section on the side of the car and bolting a hinge on with some sort of door lock to keep it shut. So I went online and looked for hinges and locks and found that they were pretty cheap at harbor freight so I went and picked some up.
I got the hinge to be bolted on by just cutting out two small pieces of aluminum sheet metal and drilling out some holes in it so I can have the aluminum plates behind the hinge and I could bolt the hinge to the plate through the grate of the shopping cart bars. It worked well and the door was able to open and close. I got a simple door lock on and mounted it the same way as the hinge and the door was able to open and close with some jank to it.
There is an issue however which is that the front of the shopping cart basket is no longer supported on the left side so it droops a lot and is extremely flimsy with little to no rigidity to it. I put a temporary solution just to keep it stable with some aluminum tube stock but the permanent solution will be simple, just some right angle stock welded in between the bottom of the frame and corner of the basket.
In terms of what's next I am going to get my hands on the pedals so I can get those mounted on for next week and after that I plan on buying the steel tubing for the roll cage. After taking some measurements the design I have in mind would need about 10 feet of tubing which would run me around 55 dollars which is a lot but really cheap for how much steel it is and a lot less than I was expecting.
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