The CIL Wheelhouse is hosting a powerchair Teardown Party, to disassemble some non-repairable chairs into parts and scrap. There is a lot of great salvage on these chairs that can be used to refurbish a chair in better condition!
GOAT staff will be there with tools to help out the CIL folks and other volunteers. If you can make it, bring what tools you can – but just showing up will be helpful even if you only have an hour to spare!
Taking things apart is a great way to learn how they work, and you get some familiarity with different kinds of powerchairs and what tools you need to fix them (Or in this case, un-fix them).
This is probably something CIL folks had been planning already, but I like to think that our BARC discussions helped move it along (and that lots of BARC folks will show up)!
Here’s the invitation,
CIL’s Wheelhouse team would like to invite you to a powerchair teardown party this Thursday, August 27th from 12-4pm. We are making space in the Wheelhouse and have lots of devices we want to disassemble and salvage parts from. Feel free to stop by or stay the whole time.
The Wheelhouse address is 801 W Grand Ave, Oakland, CA 94607 and there will be indoor and outdoor work space, pizza, and drinks. Masks will be required indoors.
Please RSVP by emailing Ash at awagner@thecil.org by Wednesday, August 26th and let them know if you have any dietary restrictions. If you have tools (wrenches, ratchets, screwdrivers, etc.) or bins to use for sorting and don’t mind bringing them, that would be great.
We hope to see you there and feel free to reach out with any questions!
Thank you,
Adriana, Ash, Jade, Jorell, John, and Morgan
Our days at GOAT Space are a lively whirl of buildout, inventory, volunteers, and visitors coming in! I want to try to describe what I can remember of this past week.
We found cushions, backrests, seat slings, tires, and footrests for people coming in, and also for sharing with the CIL and ReCares! It is great when we get to hang out with people like Anna and CC from ReCares and of course the entire CIL crew.
We had many volunteers come in on different days, including my mom and dad, Dewi, and nearly everyone who dropped by, for “Bolt University”, a silly name for our big table where we are sorting out nuts, bolts, washers, and screws into logical groupings. We have several more enormous buckets of this stuff to get through for the initial rough sort. Then, a more detailed sort so that we can get things separated by thread count, width, length and other qualities!
Bolt University’s sorting in progress
Corbett came in to consult with Olga about a custom shoe/foot holder they are building together, and she also brought in Teresa, who she met on the street whose rollator needed a lot of work. We fixed up the brakes on her rollator, cleaned out the wheels, and figured out what needed tightening up, while Teresa sat and had tea and snacks and watched how we adjusted the brake cables. Our search for the right nuts and bolts to replace missing ones was helped greatly by the Bolt University table! And Teresa was very happy to get rid of the multiple rubber bands and hair ties she had been using to hold the walker frame together, and to have spare nuts and bolts in her new toolkit.
C. came by to pick up her mom’s battered Everest and Jennings folding manual chair. I had tackled this one considering it more my speed (easy mode) to fix up. It took me a few hours to overhaul it with new armrests, a seat sling, and new spacers and bolts in the brakes. The old bolts were almost completely stripped of their thread. From the look of this chair and the wear on it, I thought it must be over 20 years old, but it turns out the model has only been around since 2019.
Gnarly wheelchair brakes in need of some love
While I was fixing the brakes, my friend Tiffany (The ADHD PHD) came by for us to go to lunch, and peppered me with questions. Why did the brakes fail? (broken spacer washers) What exactly was the material of the old washers that I suggested had broken and fallen out? (dunno maybe nylon or teflon) Did I have one of the broken washers for her to analyze under an electron microscope? (What? No! Cool though!) She took a nylon (?) washer that I was using as a replacement to analyze it and will let me know if she can come up with what materials they SHOULD be made from. Lunch with Tiffany and Ian at Swan’s market
I can’t remember why Mia showed up, I think for the tour of the space which she heard about from the Tune Up event at the DCC, but also to investigate whether we had spare broken wheelchairs she could use in a planned sculpture work that will contribute to her occupation of the Pioneer monument in San Francisco. She ended up doing some more work on her chair and then helping me with the E&J seat sling replacement!
Asher came by to talk about standing frames with Olga, and ended up doing some work on his manual chair.
Asher working on his chair
Asher, who is in the Physician’s Assistant program at Merritt College, had been working on accommodations with the college and various agencies but they were a bit stuck on how to best get Asher to be able to participate in the anatomy class’s cadaver lab for dissections. The tables are at a standing height and some of them are adjustable so one could be lowered, but then Asher would still not be in position from a manual chair to bend over and do the work, and other students in the group at the same table would have to bend way over or sit down themselves (somehow not considered a serious option). So they were looking at standing frames or sit to stand hybrid chairs, which are quite expensive and even if they could be funded, would not be obtainable in time for class. We were all kind of excited to support there being another wheelchair using, disabled professional in the medical field. Olga suggested a powerchair with raise and tilt. We had one nearly in working order from a recent donation. Olga tore into it like a determined whirlwind and had it going by the end of the afternoon!
The next day Asher came back with a friend to try it out and take it to the lab. Me, Ian, and Olga all trooped off partly out of mad curiosity to see the cadaver lab but partly to just show up en masse in all our crip, wheely glory. I think it is powerful in itself when you are asking for accomodations to show up with a squad; or just to have other disabled people or wheelchair users in the daily context where usually, it’s just you. So we went as a solidarity task force too and were taken upstairs by the friendly facilities guy.
Waiting in the Merritt College building lobby
The dissecting tables have a foot rest part that was not moveable but we got it all into position so that the powerchair’s footrest was above the table support, one armrest could be raised, and the joystick arm easily positionable as well, with a seatbelt harness so that Asher could safely lean over with a scalpel in hand and scientific gleam in his eye.
Asher in position over the dissecting table
Praise came by to pick up armrests we found that fit their chair, and some other useful things. We met last week when Praise came in (with their leashed service cat in a backpack!) “off of an instagram post” to work on her manual wheelchair, a sporty orange Kia.
Praise at work on front casters
Praise wants to come back and volunteer for GOAT in the shop and also making flyers with us! This is one of my favorite parts of having this physical space. It is becoming a real community hub, and so many people who come in, end up coming back to be a part of it and make it a vibrant, lively place to be and learn and create !
Thursday and Friday I wasn’t around, but I heard that local athlete and advocate C. stopped by for a look at our cushion selection for her own chair. She has already come by to volunteer in the past! And, Tower and Juno ended up doing some interesting and fun modifications for C., who has a large sign on the back of her chair. They added a custom made holder for C.’s reacher-grabber, added a bag she could get to (that would not block the sign), and added some extra lumbar supports!
That is not even everything, but it’s long enough of a story for now. A week in the life of GOAT Space!
Please come by if you’re local or travelling in the area! You are very welcome.
And, if you enjoyed this post, and want to support more of these amazing hijinks, PLEASE DONATE! Not just donating broken assistive tech, but cold hard (digital) cash via direct donation link, or via joining our Patreon!
Our Bay Area Repair Coalition summit went really well! We got a last minute offer of food and travel funding from OSHWA/Open Healthware, which meant we could offer our 25+ BARC attendees lunch rather than just drinks and snacks. We also flew out last minute special guest Erik Kondo, open source wheelchair designer and builder, and planned a day long event at GOAT Space the day after BARC met. I’ll report here on BARC and then in our next post will cover the open source wheelchair build day!
Here’s a link to all the photos from both days: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhenry/albums/72177720335150575
Thanks to GOAT crew and my partner Danny, we made ourselves a cozy meeting space in the big conference room at the Ed Roberts Campus building in Berkeley. Danny ran our A/V and streaming setup and also took amazingly great notes. My notes combined with his notes are available if anyone would like to read them.
From years of tech conference going and speaking, I am an aficionado of loosely structured unconference style events. Everyone also seems to like the “hallway track”, a term that refers to how the best parts of a conference are sometimes the chance discussions you have in the hall or between events. So we started with an hour for lunch together. This also meant we gave stragglers time to show up, and they would not miss the “official” start. Discussions were too lively and varied for me to track but I was so happy to see people meeting each other for the first time, or re-meeting after years!
We then had a brief go-round the room for introductions and where you work, what you do. After that, a second round robin for talking about your work and issues that come up for you. This became in a lightly facilitated discussion, returning nicely to our “go around the room” structure.
With 10 minutes to go till the planned break at 3, Corbett O’Toole gave a talk, A Life of Hacks, talking about some of the different adaptive devices she has needed, designed, and built in collaboration with others over the years. She is an expert at accessible RV and bus living, and at making adaptive stuff out of cheap things from a hardware store and scavenged parts. Her perspective on hacking, making, and designing for adaptability and repairability is always valuable. I hope GOAT will do more talks and events with her!
Slides: A Life of Hacks
Text: A Life of Hacks script
Our 15 minute break became such a successful and lively “Hallway Track” that I did not have the heart to interrupt it. I remember Danny and I exchanging a telepathic glance, then muttering to each other that we should let the unstructured conversations flow. Anarchist facilitators slipping into goblin mode! With only half an hour left till our planned ending time, I called people back to “order” and we had a final go-round to mention anything unmentioned, or a take away point or next step they have in mind.
Tower writing out our schedule for the day
Here are some ideas for action that came up during the discussion.
Tours of each other’s spaces
. I think this is already happening, unstructured, but from email responses and follow up conversations I have the sense that I or GOAT should step up to declare or bless some “open house” tour dates.
Community Backups
This was an idea bandied around a bit. Community members could agree to be decentralized storage. BARC could have a tracking system so we know where the chairs are kept. For our “working but not placed” chairs but could also be for a wheelchair user’s backup chair that they can’t store. Many people have limited, or no, space in their home (even if they are housed securely).
Storage in general for donations!
This is a big problem. Many of us are already unofficially sharing inventory and passing donated chairs around. Could we share a warehouse storage space? Could we afford a van to transport for pickup and dropoff of donated chairs? Will a local municipality, maybe, give us free or extremely cheap space to store something like 50 powerchairs?
A website for requests
A person puts in their city, and then has a checkbox to consent for their request to be visible to all the BARC orgs. That way we can figure out who can help them and who has what they need. (That may be different orgs!) Could we use ReCares’ system of Google forms? For both DME requested and available for donation.
Working with MTC
Treating our needs as part of transit could be possible. MTC funds breakdown support for highways. We could make a case for wheelchair breakdown service !
Assuaging liability fears
Waivers or some boilerplate legal templates to ameliorate potential repairer’s liability fears. Maybe some legal support.
Independent repair shops or mobile repair
Is there a viable path to people starting independent repair shops or businesses? that’s part of the point of recent Right to Repair legislation. We can enter coalition with bike repair people for example. But can a person make a living?
Training and education in OT/medical/ATP / vendor systems
How to get the wheelchair with the functionality you need, and get insurance or medicare to pay for it? We could cross train in this.
High demand for rollators
Could we start a program to get more rollators out there in lieu of the low end walkers people get at the hospital? Can we just build some, cheaper and more easily repairable, out of PVC, decent wheels, and brake assemblies?
Medical establishment
Ways we could work with local hospitals/rehab/OTs? Kaiser?
Putting together “actually useful” manuals from owners’ and service manuals
Mailing list: We can use https://groups.google.com/a/openassistivetech.org/g/BARC
With lanyards and badge holders left over from OSHWA’s Open Healthware conference, I whipped up cute looking name badges. We also ended up printing out “Repair is Care” and “Maintenance is Love” stickers on laser printer sticker papers. My years of zine life come in handy. People seemed surprised by the air of legitimacy conferred by BADGES. It is like the “front matter” and dust jackets of a book, just create a flurry of material around your event and it starts to become real in people’s minds. I loved seeing people take all the stickers!
Another great pleasure for me during this event was getting to put people I like and admire in the same room. What happens next is unpredictable, like the spiral paths in a cloud chamber when you have banged things together in a particle accelerator. Seeing Erik roll up in his custom built PVC pipe wheelchair, to meet Ralf Hotchkiss of Rough Rider and Whirlwind Wheelchair International, made me instantly happy in a way I can’t quite describe. And I want people who are so staunch as to be legendary, like John Benson, to be and feel supported, loved, and part of a group rather than the one critical piece in a ramshackle structure about to fall over (which is kind of how the community treats him to be honest).
Ralf Hotchkiss with his portable toolkit laid out
But above all I felt very happy that the energy in the room built on itself in a way that I think will fuel our desperately needed movement for disabled peoples’ uninterrupted access to appropriate, well maintained, mobility equipment. All of the organizations I know of doing this work, and individuals too, come to it because it is needed and they cannot help but gravitate towards doing what clearly needs to be done. We can build enormous momentum together and gather strength and gather more people to not just learn skills but make a collaborative and sustainable way of doing this work, that others can replicate.
We shared the full notes with all the invitees, so let me share them with you too!
If you would like to support more BARC action and what GOAT is doing, please donate money to help us in our work! We appreciate any level of help – direct donation or you can subscribe to our Patreon with a monthly donation! We welcome corporate matching funds via Benevity and OpenDoor or really, any others you suggest.
