Caster
type of wheel mounted on the bottom of an object
A caster (or castor) is an undriven wheel that is designed to be attached to the bottom of a larger object (the "vehicle") to enable that object to be moved.
Casters are used in numerous applications, including shopping carts, office chairs, toy wagons, hospital beds, and material handling equipment. High capacity, heavy duty casters are used in many industrial applications, such as platform trucks, carts, assemblies, and tow lines in plants.
Types
Casters may be fixed to roll along a straight line path, or mounted on a pivot or pintle such that the wheel will automatically align itself to the direction of travel.
Rigid casters
A basic, rigid caster consists of a wheel mounted to a stationary fork. The orientation of the fork, which is fixed relative to the vehicle, is determined when the caster is mounted to the vehicle. An example of this is the wheels found at the rear of a shopping cart in North America. Rigid casters tend to restrict vehicle motion so that the vehicle travels along a straight line.
Swivel casters
Like the simpler rigid caster, a swivel caster incorporates a wheel mounted to a fork, but an additional swivel joint above the fork allows the fork to freely rotate about 360°, thus enabling the wheel to roll in any direction. This makes it possible to easily move the vehicle in any direction without changing its orientation.
“Caster” enters the record as type of wheel mounted on the bottom of an object. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Caster, type and wheel can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1534874. The Library of Congress control number is sh99002617. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Caster” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.