First Impressions
I received the trolley and my initial impression was "Oh, they forgot to package it up". The only protection for this £200 trolley was some black shrink wrap around the body of the trolley with the documents envelope stuck to it. However, It looked OK so proceeded to tear off the shrink wrap.
The trolley arrives in its folded form which is handy if space is of a premium in the back of the van. The uprights are attached to the trolley at the bottom with an M8 bolt which also acts as a hinge.
Assembly
You lift the uprights into position and these are secured in by another M8 cap head bolt which is provided. This feature by design has its problems. When you tighten the bolt, the load is in the middle of the chrome plated box section, so a penny washer is a MUST here. Without it, the constant movement of a kart being placed on the trolley and being pushed around the paddock results in the bolt denting the box section and therefore comes loose. We found this out the hard way when one of the uprights collapsed at Fulbeck in the middle of the circuit!
Uprights with penny washer, a simple addition that made the trolley much more sturdy.
Before the penny washer was used, this is what happened to the hole.
There are also sleeves on the top of the trolley at the rear which slide outward to suit your chosen mounting position on your chassis. I chose the sidepod fixings on the rear of an OTK chassis. The front horizontal bar has two cylinders, bolted from underneath. You adjust these to the width of your chassis rails to prevent the kart sliding off.
I chose to set these things up and leave the trolley built as it was an inconvenience at the track to have to set them up all the time. If you had to fold the trolley away after each use you could mark the position of the sleeves to save you time.
General use/Observations
The trolley looks great. It comes with a nice carbon fibre effect sticker on the floor tray and some (in my opinion waste of time) carbon fibre effect stickers on the top, which serve no purpose whatsoever when the kart is on top of them.
The trolley does NOT ooze quality, I expected a trolley which was nearly three times the price of my old three wheel trolley to be pretty solid.
It's quite the opposite, the kart wobbles around quite a bit and does not fill you with confidence. The construction of the trolley feels like it was done on a Friday afternoon on a production line by somebody who has to make his TIG wire last an entire lifetime. There was only a few complete welds on the trolley, most of the welding was small tacks which are JUST strong enough to pass as OK. certainly not what I was expecting from this "Ultimate Trolley".
A little more attention to detail would have been nice.
Given the amount of weight on this T section, a weld on the back and front would have tidied things up.
The foam filled wheels, which are actually supposed to be a selling point, are made of an equivalent material to my memory foam mattress, and are therefore, not brilliant at being wheels. If you leave your kart alone on the trolley for more than half an hour, they develop a flat spot which sends the whole trolley and kart into a strange waddle on the way to the dummy grid. Getting it there in one piece was harder than the actual race most of the time.
The foam filled wheels. You can see the flat spot, and also where the tyre lifts away from the rim at the top. If you turned the trolley too sharply, the tyre would try to fall off the rim
The tyres develop a flat spot when the trolley is stationary (Rotax max kart, way under the 125kg recommended trolley limit)
The flat spot does not go away once the weight is removed. It takes a good hour to return to its original form.
And last but not least, by far the biggest issue I had with this trolley was the front castor wheel.
No more than 5 meters out of the awning for first practice at the Three Sisters Circuit, we pushed the trolley through a puddle/pot hole no more than 40mm deep. The trolley stopped dead, I pulled it back and the castor had folder over to nearly 45 degrees!
The trolley would not move so the kart was removed and pushed to the grid!
Now, I'm not one to be pushing a brand new trolley (with worrying build quality) worth £200 and a kart costing thousands around the paddock like Maldonado on speed, so I expect it to be able to handle a few bumps here and there.
NOTE: There is a chance that the wheel may be been damaged in transit resulting in the following failure, and the lack of protection in which it was delivered certainly points towards the caster being bent before it was even used.
The following image is after the castor had been straightened in a vice at the track. We could not get it any straighter with the tools we had, which is strange as it bent very easily
Castor as straight as we could get it.
Summary
This review has been predominantly negative, but I really have had a terrible experience with it. I'm sure that some will be thinking I have been a little harsh, but I can only comment on this experience.
Some issues could have been easily resolved with a little effort, such as the bolts being provided with a penny washer. Simple, cheap solution.
The foam filled wheels are just not cut out to be supporting this kind of weight and pneumatic ones should come as standard.
I would like to thank KKC for sorting this out. Even if it took a while to get them to read my email. They are sending me the Senzo 4 wheel trolley. Hopefully this model will be better than the one reviewed today.
Pros
- Looks good
- Lightweight
- Collapsible
Cons
- Poor build quality
- Foam filled wheels are useless
- Unstable/Collapsed before modified bolt/washer
- Front Castor collapsed on first use
Final Word
I really wanted to love this trolley. But in it's current state its quite hard to do that. I have been told that some of these issues are being addressed so hopefully if you buy one of these, you will not have quite so many issues. For now though, I have no choice but to give it a low score.
Link to Senzo 4 Wheel Trolley
