Church Chair Dolly
If your church is going to be moving your church chairs on a regular basis, you are going to need a way to do so easily and efficiently. Church chair trucks and/or church chair dollys are the most common way for doing so in our day. However, some church chair moving devices are not very easy or very efficient to use. Let’s take a look at the two most common church chair trucks/dollys:
- A Customized Two Wheel Hand Truck: This church chair moving dolly is a tried and tested piece of equipment. It is made out of 1″ standard tube construction and has a very convenient and critical metal hand hold. While this church chair dolly resembles a standard hand truck, there is a very important difference in that the base or plate is extended in width to accommodate the width of chairs. In addition, the base has an integrated three-sided safety rail to make sure that each stack of chairs is going to be both in balance and centered before attempting to move the stack. Then when the chairs are actually being moved, the safety rails prevent the chairs from sliding to the right or left off of the dolly. In practice this means that some volunteers or staff will stack church chairs six to eight high, and then other volunteers operating the dollys will come up behind the chair stack, slide the dolly under the rear legs of the chairs, tilt the stack back, and then move them to their place of storage. This method requires only one dolly per 150 chairs or so for an efficient storage operation. Since few chair dollys are actually needed, storing them when not in use is easily solved.
- A Four Caster Square Chair Cart: This church chair storage solution has become more and more common because some church chair importers give them away as “FREE” with a purchase of church chairs. As you can see by the image of this dolly, there is really not a lot of substance to it. The small casters will roll on a smooth surface but will not work well on any sort of rougher terrain. And the perimeter frame is lacking both in width and weight. And for a church to use these effectively, they will need one dolly for each eight chairs or so. In practice this means that your volunteers will bring out the chair dollys from where they are being stored. Volunteers can then stack 6-8 chairs on each dolly. So if you have 200 chairs, you might need 25 or more dollys. Then once the stacks are in place on each dolly, you can wheel them to their storage area. For this system to be practical at all, you must leave the chairs stored on the dollys. If you have to unload the chairs from the dollys when you store them, you will be doing a lot of extra and redundant work. So while these chair dollys are fairly inexpensive, this method of moving chairs is far more expensive when you understand the amount of chair dollys actually needed.
Cheap Dolly – Free
Here’s an important point: When your church is shopping for chairs and you are told by a salesperson or a website bullet point, “Free Church Chair Dolly”, please understand that if the dolly being offered for free is the latter of the above, it really is not much of a perk. You are going to need a lot of them, they will provide a less than idea chair moving solution, and they are going to cost your church significantly more dollars and time over the long run. We recommend you go with the first solution above for your church. You’ll be glad you did!
Please remember that at Church Furniture Partner, our ministry makes available to churches almost every church chair manufactured or imported today. We would love to assist your church in saving dollars on your church chair purchase. Please contact us for that assistance!