A multifunctional 2-wheeled cart for small scale farms
Problem statement
Imagine you spend several months plus hundreds of dollars and finally come up with a wonderful design on a type of farm-use harvest cart and an attractive selling link on your web store, there are orders coming and money flowing into your account. When you go to the shipping company happily and plan to start shipping these lovely carts to your customers, the shipping company tells you the required shipping length is 4 feet, and due to oversize none of the carts can be successfully shipped. This situation is based on our client’s experience with his harvest cart design and we intend to help him solve the length problem so that his carts can be shipped to customers. Currently, there are several promising methods according to previous experience in the industry. The patent ‘stretchable and foldable cart’, which has US patent number: US5816604A, gives us two directions for solving the problem. Specifically, the two directions are making the cart frame stretchable and making the cart frame foldable. In addition, another method which just simply cuts the current frame in half, and after being shipped to the customers, they connect the frame together using bolts and nuts. In fact, each of these three methods has a certain trade-off. To be more specific, using a stretchable frame increases the weight and cost due to the added stretching system; using a foldable frame decreases the overall strength of the frame because of the folding system, reducing its operating life; and cutting and connecting the frame using bolts and nuts increases the difficulty level for the users to use because every time they want to store the cart, there is a lot of work needed on the bolts and nuts. Ultimately, our solution will bring a newly designed cart frame that not only solves the shipping length problem but also matches our client’s expectations of the cart being lightweight, low-cost, easy to produce, capable of handling the required load, and easy for customers’ usage. On a larger scale, our solution could help solve or at least provide a reference to other farming carts that are restricted by shipping length requirements.
Team members
Olivia Bizal – leader
Thomas Jiang – communicator
Xiangyu Zhong – accountant
Saad Ahmed – admin
Client
John Hendrickson
Small Farm Works LLC