Seitech Trolley/Dolly Repairs

I love my old Seitech trolley and over the years it has been well used and also abused (usually by other sailors stacking their heavy steel trollies on top of it). As a result, the three plastic angled brackets (the one at the front and the ones at each side) had cracked and needed replacing. The plastic handles had also degraded and were very sticky.

Simple I thought - just get some of the Dynamic fittings as the trolley designs are very similar and they use the same aluminium tubing. It didn’t turn out to be as easy as I had hoped.

Firstly the good news. Once the old Seitech plastic handles had been cut and pulled off the Dynamic handles were easy to push on in their place.

Now the not so good news. Replacing three plastic brackets was not easy. Although the tubing is the same, the plastic moulding designs are quite different, as are the fixing hole sizes and positions. Replacing the three brackets took quite a number of hours, with lots of cutting and drilling.

The original Seitech plastic mouldings were one piece, where the tube slid into the moulding and then the fixing bolts pushed through. The Dynamic design differs as the plastic moulding is split into two halves, with each side designed to locate over much larger holes in the aluminium tubing. This looks like a better design in that the stainless steel bolt doesn’t come into contact with the aluminium, but fitting these to the Seitech trolley required the holes in the tube be enlarged from the original hole size (around 7mm) to approximately 13mm. Note - all the photos show the original tubing hole sizes and positions before modification.

To compound the problem the hole locations were either not the same relative to the tube end, requiring a small amount of tubing to be cut off, or were completely different. Bolt lengths remain the same, with the exception of some of the bolts used to hold the axle in place which can be shorter than the original Seitech ones.

The hole positions for the side support/axle moulding also differed. For the axle itself, the hole diameters remain the same, but their locations need to change. The easiest solution was to rotate the axle 90 degrees and drill four new holes through each axle. I maybe should also have drilled a new hole for the wheel retaining R clip as this is now horizontal rather than vertical so more prone to getting dislodged.

The biggest challenge was accurately enlarging all the fixing holes. This was not at all easy and would have benefitted from being done in a proper metalworking shop. Using a hand electric drill resulted in innacurate/offset holes that then had to be enlarged even further to fit over the raised locating part of the mouldings.

But it was done, and my old Seitech trolley has been given a new lease of life. I may have a go at replacing the ‘flip up’ gunwhale supports at a later date as one of those has broken, but I rarely use them.

So, in summary if you want to do these repairs it is possible, but it is not as easy as you may have thought.

You can get all the parts from your local Dynamic stockist (I got my parts from my good friends at SailingFast in the UK).