Our February Tune-Up Tuesday wheelchair maintenance and repair event was a blast as usual. This month we held it at the ILRCSF, coinciding with a craft event for decoupaging little boxes. It turns out that crafting skills and DIY maintenance skills have a lot of overlap!
Here’s some of what we did:
took the wheels off a Go-Go mobility scooter to clean them out. Result: giant hairball, smoother ride
extra note of how great it is to have a wheelchair / scooter jack!
Adjusted and tightened all the armrest and other hardware so that the entire scooter was less rattly
plans for further work in a follow up visit (drilling some holes in metal)
rollator refurbishing and discussion of pain points (janky plastic wheels rather than rubber/pneumatic tires), along with tips on how to get started to get a better one
handed out our mini Fix-it Kits, lightly customized
I had a good time crawling around on the floor with Angello, Olga, and Vince, fixing stuff! As Angello said later, “it doesn’t even feel like work, it just feels like hanging out”.
For our next event, March 3 at the Disability Cultural Center, I added a new tagline, “Technology is power, and tech support is love”.
What do you think of that for a slogan? Maybe it’s too long for a sticker. It could be two separate stickers! Another good one, simply, “Ride or Die”.
This was meant to go out as a newsletter at the end of last year, and I only just realized that it got stuck in our newsletter back end! So here is our little summary of 2025 for you all on the blog, insteead.
We’ve had an active year so far at GOAT!
In the summer, we made great progress on preservation work. Our archive team has catalogued nearly 150 interesting, useful, and rare items from the Enders Archive. We have scanned 56 items which are now uploaded to the Internet Archive with the physical materials hosted at the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, where you can browse them in person!
We are looking for donations to support our paid intern to do more high-speed book scanning, to pay our program director Olga to hold events
At our workshops so far in 2025, we distributed 45 “Fix it Kits” in a pilot program. These bags, about the size of a large pencil pouch for a binder, are packed full of useful wheelchair tools and repair materials. They also include a zine on wheelchair, walker, and rollator maintenance.
Future kits and version 2 of the zine workbook are now under construction. We are making two different kits: one, the Workshop Kit, which is more complete and with more tools. It is meant for our events, with one-on-one work with GOAT volunteers and attendees, to walk attendees through inspecting their devices to gather information and adapt the tools to their needs. The second style, our Street Kit, contains minimal tools, but more “fasteners” like cable ties, velcro straps, and gaffer tape. It is designed to pass out more casually on the street or at more fast paced events that don’t allow focused one-on-one work. There is also a broader range of tools and supplies in our Grab Bag so that we can customize the Workshop and Street kits individually, to fit someone’s particular dexterity and their mobility gear.
Your donations to GOAT can help us buy the materials and tools for these free repair kits! And if you would like to buy supplies directly, we have a wishlist.
Collaborations
GOAT is working with other community partners in many ways this year.
We are marshalling volunteers for weekly visits to the CIL’s Wheelhouse, where we are helping to organize and store their inventory of donated assistive tech. It’s like a warehouse and workshop, or a huge wheelchair pick & pull. Some of what we are doing is breaking down unrepairable powerchairs for parts, but I think there is a meta level of developing a larger crew of people who understand the AT resources of the Bay Area and are able to tell people about them. And these folks may also be the pool of future mobility gear repair and refurbishment techs that our “ecosystem” desperately needs!
Liz and Olga at the SFDCC
We are working with University of Washington’s a11yhood project team and CREATE as a community partner, to make DIY assistive tech more widely and freely available, findable, and curatable!
We stocked the SF Disability Cultural Center with a Fix-It workbook and a full toolkit for minor wheelchair repair and maintenance.
We collaborated with Easy Does It Services, ILRCSF, the CIL, and other orgs for our project to Get Andrei Rolling Again.
And with other local projects like C.R.I.P.S.R.I.S.E. we are working to spread knowledge of how to use 3D scanning and printing for assistive tech in the community.
logo with neon splash text, tools, soldering iron, wheelchair
Recent blog posts
For more details on GOAT’s activities in the last few months, have a look at our blog posts:
Grassroots Open Assistive Tech’s purpose is to document, curate, preserve, make accessible, and freely share assistive technology designs and information under open licenses, as well as providing coordination and education to affiliated communities.
We support disabled people in making their designs and builds available for public good, and in having free to use designs available to them for their own use.
To avoid our paying transaction fees, you can send a physical check made out to Grassroots Open Assistive Tech, to GOAT, PO Box 720011, San Francisco, CA 94172.
Last fall, GOAT started collaborating with Andrei, a wheelchair user in Moldova, to help out with his Permobil F5 joystick issues. Here’s an update! We have ended up in a more long term collaboration between Easy Does It Services, ILRCSF, occupational therapist Judi Rogers, and the CIL in Berkeley to get the necessary equipment and expertise so he can get outside this spring. It has been really delightful getting to know Andrei and working with everyone!
While Andrei’s fluency in English is great, we end up with our meetings half in Russian and half in English since Levan and Olga both also speak Russian. I turn on Google Translate in my phone to get near-instant written translation of the meeting. I have even learned a few Russian words though they are the bare minimum of what you might absorb easily: Yes, No, OK (horosho) and Thanks!
Levan from EDI and Olga are doing a ton of work to provide Andrei with several different options to control his powerchair and also to give him some flexible options for game and computer control that are less dependent on hand strength and dexterity. This includes chin, head, and attendant controls as well as a mini joystick and new armrest/table, new batteries, more positioning / seating options, and all the stuff to mount these things onto the chair. Some of that is from scavenged or donated supplies and some is new (funded by YOU!)
Andrei already experiments with his computer control setup a lot, so I am always learning about new software from him. For example, he recommends Handy as free and open source software for speech to text. As a bonus it is very privacy protecting (and fast) as it doesn’t send your voice or text to the cloud, it works locally on your devices and is highly customizable. He also talked a bit about VoiceBot, which sounds interesting, but is less free. And this device called a Razer Tartarus, extremely cool visually, which used to work well for him, but which now he needs to adapt in some way so that he can control it.
Bruce is always sending new ideas and contacting manufactorers for potential devices, like mouth control via the MouthPad , and others have stepped in to suggest drug therapies that can slow the progression of Andrei’s condition, something that will become possible if either Genentech opens a deal for compassionate therapy with his country, or if his dual citizenship with his father’s country comes through.
We have planned out Olga’s visit to Moldova, but have not yet pinned down a travel date. It should be pretty close, though. We are thinking if not before, then maybe in March just after we get back from the CSUN Assistive Technology conference.
Thank you for all your donations that are making this collaboration possible!
The point that comes through very strongly in this project ,as well as even our most casual workshop, is that THE TECHNOLOGY IS NOT ENOUGH. You can have the fanciest, most expensive assistive tech in the world, and it means nothing if you don’t have expert help or advice in making it work for you — the role of occupational or rehab therapists. AND, you need resources for maintenance, repair, spare parts, service manuals, and help to implement all of this, which is also something that can’t be done in one half hour encounter, you need to try things, iterate, and adjust in collaboration.
GOAT is now co-hosting monthly wheelchair maintenance workshops along with Vince Lopez from ILRCSF!
Our first Tune Up Tuesday will be held at the ILRCSF office.
When: Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2:30pm – 4:30pm Where: ILRCSF, 825 Howard St, San Francisco
Register: Contact Vince, 415-609-2555 or vincent@ilrcsf.org
We can inspect your mobility device together, talk about anything about your chair that is causing you trouble, do some basic maintenance, teach you preventative maintenance, and share free tools and materials.
Users of manual wheelchairs, powerchair, scooter, rollators, and other mobility equipment, and their friends and family, are welcome to drop by!
We can also help you to find the service manual and user manual for your own device, and get it to you in a paper or an electronic copy.
GOAT has free mini-toolkits to give out along with a short guide on San Francisco repair, DIY, and assistive tech resources!
We also often have free accessories like cargo nets, headlights, bags or pouches, and so on. And we’re happy to work with you to improve what you have now, so that it meets your needs.
Finally, if you are interested in learning wheelchair maintenance and repair, either to support yourself and friends, or as a possible career, come by and help out as a volunteer!
Our March Tune up Tuesday will be hosted at the Disability Cultural Center. We plan to host it there regularly!
GOAT is now co-hosting monthly wheelchair maintenance workshops along with Vince Lopez from