Jzoe Blog

I’m glad to say that this is one project that is finally over, hopefully with a happy ending. A long time ago, I forget the story that led up to it, Kendra asked me to make a stick with a hook on the end. With her old wheelchair it was really useful, and she used it to pick things up off of the ground and press dirty elevator buttons.

It was a good stick, but when she got her new chair storage became a problem. She used to keep it right next to her, but on the new chair the end of the stick wound up in an area with moving parts. The first time she used her tilt/recline, the end of the stick snapped off. I think the noise scared us both!

After that, I took a shot at building a two-part folding stick to replace it. I tried to keep using oak for the beauty of it, and a copper tube for the coupling, but I just couldn’t get it to work out. The sizes were just slightly off, and I didn’t have the tools to make things “just right”. In retrospect, I probably could have used the lathe at work, but hindsight is 20/20. We’ll see how the present stick works out.

The latest attempt at the two-part stick-with-a-hook is hollow fiberglass with a steel coupling, all covered in a black gloss enamel. Here’s a picture:

I think the finish makes it look a little like one of those magician’s wands I remember seeing as a kid… but I hope Kendra doesn’t see that, or she might think it’s too geeky. In reality, it’s a decent match for the finish of her chair. Here’s a close-up of the joint:

There’s a big thick elastic hair band in the center of the tube holding it all together, similar to a tent pole. It’s hard to see, but there are two tiny neodymium magnets attached to the steel, and held in place with electrical tape. This lets the stick attach fairly firmly to the chair’s steel tubing. I don’t think it’s going to fall out on any bumps or anything- she stores it on the inside of the armrest anyway, so hopefully that’ll keep it safe. If it breaks, I may try a visit to REI to see about actual replacement tent poles.

Action shots soon, maybe!

Time will tell if it’s durable, or if there is anything that would make it a better tool. I must say, it put a big silly grin on my face to watch her spend a solid ten minutes (see, you people need to hire her!) pulling the stick apart and then flipping it to the “open” position out and away from her

Many of you may remember the six months I spent working at Rio Wheelchairs (AKA Daedalus Wings), and if you’ve seen my design portfolio then you’ve seen what I worked on for their lever powered wheelchair. I mapped hand and arm functions for the tasks of controlling a wheelchair to the various motions that are possible, and made sure that people with the most common level of hand/arm function would be able to interface with the lever powered wheelchair.

When I left there was still some mechanical development to do before a prototype could happen, but the basic control system was mapped out and it looked like all the pieces were ready to fit together. I’m blogging now because I recently looked at their web site: http://riomobility.com, and I saw that they’ve finally got a prototype built! In case I wasn’t clear, the credit I can take for this design is fairly limited. The gearing was a MAJOR undertaking, and it had been under way for nearly a year before I showed up. Almost half my time at Rio was on another project, and so my contribution to this lever chair is really a small part of all that went into it. I give these guys a lot of credit for getting this far, and I’m really happy that I had a chance to work with them on it.

Here’s there image:

I’m not sure if they were planning on filing any patents or not, but this image is already on their website so it can’t do any harm if I repost it a bit more. I’m really psyched to go try out one of these chairs, and see how it really feels to move around in one. I think we were really onto something with the controls, but how can you ever really know until you try it out organically? There are a couple of small things I see in this image that I’m really not crazy about, but I understand that they’re on a tight budget so they really had to make some tough choices in order to get the thing built at all. I hope it works well, and I hope they sell thousands of them.