August Tune Up report: On Backups!

We had another great Tune Up Tuesday at the Disability Cultural Center in San Francisco! It was relatively small and cozy, with 8 participants coming for maintenance and repair work, and our core crew of Olga, me, Vince, and Angello. And we were joined this time by new GOAT volunteer Dewi, who did a lot of the initial “intake” to talk with people about their mobility gear and what they were looking for and who also got down and dirty on the floor to overhaul a rollator!

Lately we have been doing a lot of showing people how to remove wheels from their chair or rollator, to clean out the gunk and hair that builds up around the axles and bearings. It is often people’s first time wielding an allen wrench or adjustable wrench to the chant of “righty tighty, lefty loosey”! It is especially satisfying, I think, to be using the tools that come in our free toolkit pouches!

Olga and others working together fixed some problems with a manual chair including trueing up the wheels. One wheel was rubbing up against the side guard. If you stare from the top One of the chair you can see the issue and you fix it by adjusting the doohickeys that the wheels slot into, which slide along a central pole in this case. So both wheel axle receivers needed to be scooted over a bit and re-tightened. Fixed!!

We also gave some tips and advice to someone who is about to get their first wheelchair and is looking at options but without a lot of context to make decisions. This is actually work I do a lot, informally, just talking with people on the bus or while I’m doing errands going about my day. Olga and I both weighed in with an overview of the types of chair, powerchair, and scooter that might work, and pros and cons of them all. For example you might want to keep driving so you need something that fits in a car. But you also want to go out in your own neighborhood and you live on a giant hill (that’s me….). To top off our crash course in wheeled things, I let our new denizen of the cripsterhood try out my Whill C2.

We are getting popular, and now I kind of expect to look up at our Tune Ups and see a journalist of one kind or another. This month we had a photographer and journalist from KQED! And then this journalist showed up at our open source wheelchair build last weekend, too! (Next month, we have a new journalist coming to follow GOAT around for a week – an EMBEDDED GOAT!)

For the people who needed more complex help we had Vince from ILRCSF on hand. He does a lot of follow up to help people work with insurance and their own medical team and vendors to make sure they get equipment that keeps them mobile and suits their needs. Once you get it, keeping it repaired is weirdly complicated and can take a very long time! In the meantime, organizations like ILRCSF, MELP, CIL, ReCARES, and now GOAT, can help provide loaner chairs or other equipment.

The more complicated the chair and a person’s needs are the more this has a million chances to go wrong! The loaners often aren’t quite right or are not in great condition.

Really, every wheelchair user needs at least one “backup chair” in good working order. I know, people have enough problems keeping one chair working. But I’m here to tell you that you are going to need that backup!

In our community we see people’s backup chairs getting passed around from hand to hand. I wonder if that kind of informal arrangement could be structured, so that we (whoever “we” is) could invite in allies to keep a wheelchair stored and in decent condition. Do you have space in your garage or other sheltered indoor spot to keep a wheelchair, or, space with an outlet to keep a powerchair charged? What if you became a “community backup” and stored that chair for someone who would like to have it on hand in case of emergencies? I like this idea, and might try to make it happen.