UnCart™ running circles around would-be thieves

Shopping carts abandoned in neighborhoods, parks and on street corners. We all see it, but few of us do anything about it. Not until Yorba Linda resident James Prather recognized the the problem and went about solving it, even though it took him more than seven years.
“I get ideas, and I can’t let go,” Prather said. “I have a God-given talent that I can get a three-dimensional idea in my head and take it apart and put it back together.”
In fact, Prather has many inventions under his belt, including a type of holographic paint finish as well as a virtual reality amusement park ride.
His UnCart™ system is just the latest in the line of inventions.
A marine who served in Vietnam, Prather worked after the war as an ironworker for 12 years and a building inspector for about eight years. However, since an accident in July left him unable to inspect buildings any longer, managing his inventions is his full time job. Prather, along with three other men who have formed a company called MIND WURX^®, developed and patented the UnCart™, a shopping cart system devised to prevent thefts. The cart looks just like any other shopping cart, but it is a mechanical and electronic wonder with six wheels. When activated, the front wheels of the cart retract, lowering the cart about ¾-inch onto a set of fixed diagonal wheels that move only in a circle. “It directs momentum of people trying to push the shopping cart,” Prather said. Anyone trying to push the cart will only go in circles.
Essentially, when the system is activated, all six wheels of the cart are disabled. And any attempt to overcome the circling front wheels by balancing the cart on its back wheels will only turn it to fixed metal coverings.
The UnCart™ system – which endured a 90-day test at an Albertson’s Food and Drug store in Wilmington with just one lost cart – includes an amplified transmitter located in the store. In addition, there is a cable sensor marked by a circular yellow line around the store lot’s boundaries, the specially devised shopping carts and a mechanical wand that returns the cart to use after the special wheels have been activated.
Prather first recognized the problem of shopping carts sitting around neighborhood streets in the late 1970s and discussed it with friend Patrick Maandag.
“I had a shop in Fullerton, and there were carts everywhere,” Maandag said.
The two men talked about the problem and discussed ways to solve it.
“The loss is out of control in the communities,” Prather said. “We’re solving an obvious problem.” After playing around with the idea for a while, and even coming up with models that turned out to have flaws, Prather said the idea for the UnCart™ just hit him out of the blue. “We were flying from Michigan at 35,000 miles and it just came to me,” he said.

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