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”.
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GOAT is now co-hosting monthly wheelchair maintenance workshops along with Vince Lopez from