Inadvisable Inovativ hacking

As part of the grip truck project, I retired my homebrew gear carts and splurged on a beautiful Inovativ Voyager EVO-X cart. I love it madly, especially the fact that all four wheels can swivel and I can crab-walk (crab-wheel?) the thing through the small spaces I tend to work in.

It's so useful that, well, I wanted a second one. I decided to "save" some money and targeted the slightly lower-featured Voyager NXT line instead because I don't need a height-adjustable shelf on every cart. When Inovativ had a B-stock sale after a recent trade show, I pulled the trigger.

Welp, it turns out that the NXT carts only have two swivel wheels so no crabbing for me. (This is readily apparent from the images and specs, I'm just dumb.)

So crabby me wants the crabbing cart back and I investigate options. Upgrading to EVO-X wheels: $1300 == no thanks. Upgrading to two new swivel NXT wheels (custom order from Inovativ): $478 == sort of no thanks.

Some sleuthing on McMaster reveals that there is a 10" flat-free swivel caster for ~$90 that should fit, and fit it does (mostly)!

The main challenge is that the swivel bearing of the McMaster caster is substantially larger than the one on the stock Voyager NXT caster so I have to grind down the washers until they're not blocking the rotation.

The Inovativ and McMaster wheels have the same inner bore (which makes sense given they're both imperial 10" casters) so I can just swap the existing wheels into the new yokes.

I spraypainted the yokes before installing them to fit in with the overall Inovativ black look. Will that paint hold up? Probably not.

That said

So is this actually a good idea? With the time spent researching, spraypainting, futzing with a grinder on the washers, getting threadlock on my fingers, etc., I should have probably just taken Inovativ up on their offer to sell me their own swivel wheels.

But hey, if you want to hack your own cart, now you know how.