#HTE

An Even Better Design for a Stair-Climbing Handtruck

After seeing the Stair-Climbing Wheel Design for Handtrucks we posted, engineer Adrienne Clark wrote to us:

I am a mechanical engineer at Fikst, a mechanical engineering consulting firm in the Greater Boston area. I saw the Stair Climbing Handtruck post yesterday and I noticed that all of the handtrucks in the post use the same technology, the three wheel design, which is helpful for lighter loads but not for real lifting.

We developed a hand truck at Fikst that uses mechanical leverage to help you get really heavy items over a curb or up a set of stairs. If you are interested, take a look.

So we did, and the design seems fantastic:

Look more closely at the design and you’ll see it’s not just the levers down by the wheels that provide the assistance…

….but the handle placement as well:

Clark goes on to write “I, a petite woman, am able to get multiple reams of paper up a set of stairs using this thing!”

Now for the crappy part:

“Our hand truck is not currently available but is a totally different approach to a similar problem, so I thought that I would write in to share.”

Sigh. Engineering FTW, Sales/Marketing/Business Reality FTL!

http://www.core77.com/posts/53141/An-Even-Better-Design-for-a-Stair-Climbing-Handtruck