A dialogue for professional cart-smarties.

This dialog appears on Roadfood forums where I hope to get some input, as well as share some advice about the appropriately famous Victor cart design in use all over the USA and in fact duplicated outright by at least one other cart manufacturer at one time. The design we refer to is the genuine product by the original producer.

05/11/2009

A well designed cart. Almost artistic in it's overall economy and simplicity.

Victor carts are all over Phoenix and in service in many states. Some complain about the workmanship and need for repairs, but these aren't flaws in workmanship. The workmanship is just fine. There are maybe some design flaws. For one thing, glued-together water compartments aren't all that durable and for another thing, the water can get too hot to handle at full burn in a Phoenix summer.

However, for simplicity of design, they are...well....pretty dang simple but those twin 30k BTU burners and full-size steam pans allow you to do events as well as street sales. You can steam 150 dogs on each side, get smacked with business and just keep cranking. Plus, if you want to get into broader catering menus, once again, full size steam pans. You can do plated service. And of course, to back off to the slow, steady volume of street sales it's no problem. Just drop your hot condiments into small pans and drop them into the steam tray.

Plus, a twin-Victor presents a much nicer frontage space to the customer. That's a nice big space for stickers or menus or signage. It's a nice looking cart.

Wells, all this combines with economy of materials and light weight to form a nearly perfect cart. Every design has it's flaws, and a lot of times, to change a design like this means you end up changing the whole thing around and loosing what was good about the original. However, it has the problems stated above, and it would be nice to have just one or two more features.

Imagining an improved hot dog cart design.

So starting with the flaws above, a fiberglass water holding tank would be great for waste water if a commercially produced size isn't available. That's something we can all do to retrofit our Victor carts. Now the hot water tank, fiberglass could be the answer but that water is getting HOT. I'm open to suggestion on that one. And of course, those tanks can be re-glued so a design change isn't necessary from the repair perspective.

The fact that the hand-wash water gets TOO hot is another story. A gravity-fed exterior-accessory cold water tank comes to mind as an obvious and inexpensive alternative.

Heck, I could probably open a Victor cart repair and upgrade shop but I got enough things going on. Me and this other phoenix hot dogger with fabrication skills are figuring out if we can build an upgraded design for competitive cost. The water issues aren't that big a challenge even in the context of the present design. To really upgrade for us would be something to expand the menu but still keep the portability and stand-alone, self-contained aspect of the Victor cart. To us in Arizona, that means adding a grill, maybe another steam pan and keeping that awesome frontage presentation.

05/30/2009

That was the post on Roadfood. But the idea is already out there because every hotdogger dreams of better equipment. And there is better equipment, the Victor triple-pan burner. 1/3 more heat and twice the cold soda storage capacity, lots more water, lots more waste-water capacity. It's Chicago Mark's standard piece of equipment. It's nice. But it has the same inherant flaws and menu limitations of the standard Victor carts.

Again, "flaws" is subjective with this cart.

In terms of weight, simplicity, ease of maintenance and perhaps above all, overall cost, it's hard to improve on this design.

One nice feature of the Victor is that the entire backing for the sneeze-guard is basically water heater. It economizes on space and theoretically it gives you as much water as you need every time you add a steam-pan. You could theoretically have a 20 pan Victor cart and always have the perfect amount of water. But we have to find some place to put cold water where it's not being heated. We leave that aside for now and concentrate on the grill.

To grill or prepare anything in Arizona means we need 3 more sinks and we need to up overall water and waste water capacity. We have room below for waste, that's no problem and we can simply make the sneeze-guard and thence overall wash water capacity bigger. Now where to locate 3 more sinks?

One aspect of the triple-Victor is the length gives us more counter-frontage to work with. But as long as we take it up with something that burns, like a grill, we have gained no space and we haven't helped our cold water situation. Nor have we made room for 3 more sinks.

It seems the one thing we have to work with over the triple-Vic is that we don't need to increase cold storage capacity for sodas. Therefore "these three sinks of Orient are" located on one end or the other of the cart. Remember, we're trying to increase menu variation, not overall capacity.

This all is adding length and weight but that's inevitable given the challenges. It's also adding to overall project cost. But I can see a solution in my mind. Now I just have to talk to the inspectors and find out if they have restrictions on how small the sinks can be and where they might have to be located with reference to the food service areas of the cart.

Of more immediate concern might be the cold water issue as I've heard increasing grumblings from the inspectors who feel that we don't wash our hands enough as it is. They are aware of the design flaw. It could be that we'll have trouble in the future with a cart that so many of us are heavily vested in.

As such, we have two potential project paths: solve existing problems or tackle new ones. I have a feeling the short-term fix for the Vics will be some sort of accessory tank that hangs off the sink-side of the sneeze-guard and feeds the cold water. It's feed hose will have to run on the exterior of the cart at some point, but it should be a pretty doable solution. For the longer term, it's starting to look like a superstructure, like a roof over head would be good for cold water storage.

You change one little thing and everything gets complicated...but we're gonna chill out for a while, get some input from other hotdoggers both here in Arizona and nationally. Besides, this isn't the only design challenge. Some Roadfooders are talking about snow-cones, shaved ice and gellato and I want to think of a way to do it without electricity. Stay tuned!

06/04/2009

Having solved the shaved ice issue (see Roadfood forums), we return to the cart. Solar power was brought up on the boards but....naw. Not this time. The big thing is Hot Dog Jim turned us onto his design which isn't a Vic after all, it's a California Cart. It utilizes a pump and does away with the hot water issue by separating hot and cold (and using a heat exchanger for hot water).

I'd forgot about the whole CA Cart story and they are kaput these days. Their site is down but I managed to salvage some information using the Wayback Machine. And we're seeing almost exactly what we want to be seeing.

Here's a design with four sinks.

Here's a design with our two pans and grill (hoo boy!)

And perhaps most importantly the schematic for the basic design at archive.org.

We have spent some time looking at other designs. The Top Dog carts are impressive. Here's a little oddity we found on CraigsList. We tried contacting the seller but he wasn't all that responsive. At a $3k asking price, I'm guessing somebody grabbed it quick.

But we've seen some tempting examples. Now I have to find some time to fit in a call with Maricopa inspectors to see about sink sizes, and I'd still like to do away with that electric pump. More discussion to follow.

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