Man, you must do some SERIOUS swap meet shopping! Cool cart though! My kids would have it destroyed in 10 minutes.
So if you saw an obviously stolen car in front of your house, you would just wheel it into the garage? Did you try to call the store and see if they wanted it back, or were they supposed to magically know it was in front of your house, waiting for them to pick it up. Go ahead and flame me all you want, stealing is stealing.
We live in a neighborhood not far from shopping, and apt/condo.town house rentals. The area has historically been "immigrant" populated as far as the rentals go; first were the Asians, then the Slavics, now it's primarily Hispanic. The grocery/department store carts are everywhere! NONE of these groups of people EVER take the carts back they STOLE from the stores to start with. I've taken as many as 4 back at once in my truck, but only from my immediate area. I think the stores should have someone monitoring their parking lots to start with, I don't think the carts are inexpensive to buy to start with, and for every one "stolen", it's the customers who ultimately foot the bill. Just because they are "left" somewhere, no matter for how long, does'nt make it right to take it. It's called, "theft by conversion". If you want a cart, go to store management, they'd probably give you a damaged/unrepairable one. I tend to agree, theft is theft, and you just stole it after someone else stole it first, and then you destroyed someone elses property by cutting it up. Sorry, Butch/56sedandelivery.
Damn... that looks like one of those Aldi's carts.... are you sure you didn't just buy it for the quarter to release it? Damn you... that quarter is just to RENT it.... not buy it!
Huh! I just took for granted everyone's garage had one or two of these. Mine were found quite a distance from any of the local stores with no identifying plastic grip handle on them. Who owns it? Also they were dropped off to me by a fellow motor head.
Not quite the same. Abandoned and unidentifiable, with no way to return it, is different. Why bother to make one? You could just go over to the original poster's house and borrow his since all he did was borrow it from the grocery store he knew it came from,"two miles down the road".
I must have got the wrong brand of cart, because when I dropped my 390 FE on it, it just folded up like a taco. The second one I "aquired" works great for trannies though.
You must have gotten a chinese cart from WalMart.I have 3 or 4 grocery cart dollies in my garage[from the s****per,not stolen].I have been rolling a complete 440 dodge engine and trans around the garage for a while on one and it has held up fine.
ive got a shopping cart welding cart and an engine stand a lone, someone left 4 or 5 of them out in front of my old shop, the other ones i took the front casters off of and used them to make various stuff.
Mine came from a Kroger store. For those less inclined to theft, if you patrol your local cart dependant business, you can occasionally find ones around back by the dumpsters with damaged baskets and handles. Fixing old carts isn't a top priority for most businesses, they usually just go out with the next dumpster load. As a side note, every so often bigger chains swap out their display racks. When the Kroger (grocery) in town renovated, I went dumpster diving and found about 40 sheets of good clean pegboard, needless to say, my garage is now lined with what would have been lining the local dump! Luke.
I like the project. I also like the "pixelated" images so you can no longer tell where the cart came from! My guess is that this one was pretty identifiable...
As a manager of a grocery store, I can tell you that carts run upwards of $250.00 a pop. If you, as a customer, are cool with paying more for your stuff in order to offset the "built-in" shrinkage cost, then please take as many as you want. Here's an idea that I use: You have a welder, you are pretty good with it, tell the manager you will fix 3 or 4 of his broken carts in return for a couple you can cut up. I'd rather spend a couple of hours or a couple of bucks and have a clean conscience. My $.02. It is a good idea though.
Go for a ride in a helicopter over suburbia sometime, There are more under clotheslines than in garages...ultimate laundry trolleys.
just dropped a 216 w/****** on one no bolts just gravity and it rolls great and you can kick it (hard)on top an it wont budge, but Im a little afraid the mattress police might also work with cold case shopping cart files.
I agree with not using nice ones that are still in use at local stores, I still return them to the stores when they show up near my house. Around here, we have c****s and the kids love to roll the carts into them, largely because they are ****ing idiots who apparently get a big kick out of watching them go "splash". When they end up in the c****s, they stay there sometimes for a year because the city drags them once a year for debris. When a cart is underwater for a year, it's pretty much destroyed. I pulled two of them from a c**** and brought them home. The wheels were frozen and the chrome was flaking off, they could never be used in the store again. If I brought them back, they would have wound up in the dumpster. I built both, but I needed them to roll over the gravel in the back yard. So I cut the wheels off, cut the baskets away, and folded the front uprights into the rear where the handle is. I kept the handles on so they would be easier to push and steer. I got two axles from the s****yard for a few bucks, and bought new hard rubber wheels from Harbor Freight for $3.99 each on sale. Welded the axles to the cart, slid the wheels on, secured them with set screw collars that I had in a bin, and welded a crossmember taken from the bottom of the baskets for the oil pans to rest on. No, they don't steer, but you can lift the handle and maneuver them fairly easily on the gravel, and they make it easy to roll an engine on dirt or gravel. And they are some strong sum*****es, the other one has a fully dressed 440 Mopar on it. In the pic you can see the peeling chrome, rust, and general c**** damage, making these good candidates for hacking on. -KK
Well, all this talk about an engine dolly/stand got me motivated to build the one I've been wanting to build to get my inline 6 project started. Years ago I picked up some stainless 2x2 with casters about 34" long at the s**** yard. They cost me about 5 bucks and I knew they would come in handy some time. This is what I built. Real easy, just needed to find the time. I will need to cut the plates back a bit b/c they are not wide enough at the closest point for the pan to slide between, but I will do that tomorrow with the plasma. Then I need to find a cherry picker so I can get the motor on the stand. My plan is to mount the motor to the stand and try to get the motor started on it.
I should really take some pics. I have a Mopar flat six block in my garage with those cheap *** put together furniture casters stuck in about a dozen of the holes in the block! Rolls around fine, total project cost zero dollars. CHAZ
i have about 6 or 7 with motors on them out in the shop. all were left by the previous own out the house. they work Great. you get them cheap too.
Even though it,s a free cart i would still go the high-tech route and lay a 4x2 under the front of the engine.
Bingo! We used to do that all the time. We never went out to specifically get a cart, we let them come to us or rescued one out of the woods. The bottom was the motor stand, some we had to weld an old car jack across it so it wouldn't spread apart. The basket part that flapped and permitted carts to go into each other was often used as a grille surface. A bit of work with a bolt cutter set those free. A few belgium blocks later we had a nice outdoor cooking area. In my mis-spent youth, we'd play shopping cart demo derby in closed shopping centers. The trick was to have 2 cars propel shopping carts head on at 30 mph and watch them crash into each other. This was before they got smart and rounded them up before they closed. Bob
i did a little bit of my own take on this... this cart was about 10 miles away from its store of origin, and looked like bob and his friends had their way with it... anyways, we cut off the top of the basket, lifted, the engine in there, stuck a spare cam in there to take some of the weight in the front and we are planing to cut a hole for the oil pan at some point, so we can make it stand upright... at the moment, we can role it, and the spare head it came with, without any problems... points to anybody who can guess what kind of engine is on there... for a hint, we call it the redblock express
I got a few of these engine carts. Back when Hills department store went bankrupt, they cleared out the store and left everything behind it for about 6 years while the place was abandoned and boarded up. Some homeless folks managed to get into the store and live there for quite some time. I got metal shelves, clothing racks, and a few carts, but my friends knew some guys that scored big and got some of the stuff from the snack bar that was buried in one of the dumpsters, including a popcorn machine, hotdog roller thing, and a deep fryer.
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You stole a shopping cart. Regardless of how it "came" into your 'possession'. I'm pretty sure you'll burn in hell. See you there.
You know, while driving on the freeway on the way to work, I p***ed a weird little trailer. Looked like a car hauler, but it had three rows of shopping carts on it - probably 20 per row... The truck hauling it had a name on the side advertising some sort of shopping cart repair company. I'd never heard of such a thing, but likely there's at least one in every city. I'll bet for a few beers I could totally get a few freebies from those guys, or get some in decent enough shape to do what I want to do with 'em for under $10... ~Jason
The Jalopy Journal
