Powered wheelbarrow - GIF

[Jon]

Powered wheelbarrow. Much as the GIF presents this as a recreational vehicle, it looks extremely useful to me, as long as it functions half this well with a full wheelbarrow load.



This reminds me of our own kenrizza's excellent Lawnmower Powered Wheelbarrow:



This is one of the less-developed frontiers in homemade tools. Store-bought powered wheelbarrows are incredibly expensive, and a homemade version is not the easiest tool to develop and use regularly.

[C-Bag]

I like the gif guys idea how to drive it. But I guess I'm old school having spent my hours wrestling wheelbarrows full of dirt, wet cement, and cement rubble. I would sacrifice the speed and the ride behind for slower more powerful and just walk behind. I only see a nightmare of the thing not having enough power to get up a ramp and jumping off to add more umph and getting tangled in the cart. And there is no way you can do those kinds of turns loaded, you'll just end up in a heap. Personally the only way it would be useful to me is electric as its easy to back up and then go fwd. You almost always need to back away from the pile first to get clearance so you don't have to turn so hard you end up dumping it.

If I was to build one I'd go with dual wheels with separate motors so it would be more like a skid steer with control being twist handles like the shifters on my bike with fwd and reverse on each handle with center detention for stop.

[Frank S]

C-bag I agree with you as long as the battery pack was mounted on a separate trolly sled underneath probably with a large wide caster wheel that way you wouldn't have to carry the battery as well as the load you could even have a load height lock bar to support the barrow and the load while moving that way your arms and hands need only to control direction and speed.
Racing around the parking lot with a wheel borrow doesn't mean it can actualy do any materials transport more of a novelty 3 wheeled stand on motor scooter to me.

[C-Bag]

Yup, balance would be paramount. I was thinking in between the wheels so you are not having to carry it too. The new lion packs for bikes are getting really small as ar the motor drives. Obviously depending on many factors you'd need several packs and chargers. I wished badly for something like that when I broke up and hauled off a cement walk way. Jack hammering out a ton (literally, they weighed it at the dump)of rubble and wheeling out of the yard then up a ramp into my trailer was way too much like work.

[Frank S]

Yep concrete doesn't seem to loose any weight when breaking it up and there is only 1 good thing about a jack hammer but you can only see it when someone else is running it but that is the 2nd good thing in itself

[Jon]