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Category: repair

Events this week! Tune Up & 3D printed tools

Published May 2, 2026 by Liz Henry

Our next Tune-Up workshop will be May 5 at the Disability Cultural Center! Register at https://disabilityculturalcenter.org

And, while this isn’t a GOAT sponsored event we want to promote the ILRCSF’s accessibility tools event the next day, on Wed. May 6 — It’s another “drop-in” style afternoon where you can come in and try some 3D printed assistive technology tools. These are often printed from free, open source designs, which means they can be easily customized to fit your needs!

3D Printing for Independent Living

 

 

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Tune Up Tuesday at the DCC

Published March 25, 2026 by Liz Henry

Our March Tune Up was at the Disability Cultural Center in SF. Now that we have a regular monthly cadence for these events, I printed and distributed flyers to pass out on the street.

overhead shot of liz on the floor with the manual chair and its stuck wheel, empty powerchair in foreground

I learned some things from my stroll down Mission from 24th Street BART station to 16th, talking with every wheelchair user I met along the way. Everyone needs maintenance on their chairs. Everyone’s front casters are shot. They rarely have their own tools. I found that if I exchanged contact info with people i talked with, then remind them about the Tune Up event, they are more likely to show up. When people got their equipment from donations, they are not likely to know where to go for maintenance.

On the day of the event I also canvassed Civic Center and UN Plazas. The result of that was several guys in powerchairs following me back to the DCC and one arriving a bit later. I had the feeling like we were a powerful brigade of little tanks rolling together in the sunny and beautiful day!

We ended up with 12 participants, I passed out toolkits to 11 of them, and we spent the next three hours hanging out, chatting, having snacks, and trying to either fix issues, experiment with modifications, or make lists of deeper problems to address. Vince from ILRCSF, our actually experienced wheelchair tech, was great help and followed up with several people the next day for replacement front casters, new (donated) batteries, and other things. We all get to listen in as he calls vendors and manufacturers for information, learning from his approach. C. from last month’s Tune Up showed up — with her front casters replaced thanks to Vince!

A lot of hair and gunk was removed from wheels, all around!!!! I think we need an entire session for Hairball Day and compete to see who can collect the most disgusting combo of greasy, dirty, pet and human hair.

A side function of Hairball Day is that everyone learns the parts of the chair. Axle, caster, and most importantly… bearings. I now kind of compulsively nag total strangers to protect their bearings and to replace the end caps that should protect those bearings from water and grit.

One person who came with a very nice Ti Lite manual chair ended up with 4 of us on the floor trying to remove one of his quick release wheels. It was NOT quick and it was not releasing! The next move really would have been to bang it lightly with an actual sledgehammer, which we weren’t prepared for, and neither was the chair’s rider! This turned out to be his old chair. He has an “identical” new one but likes the old one better. Maybe this sounds funny to you, but I do the same thing. It feels just slightly wrong to use the new one when the old one still works and it’s more familiar. But in this case the solution really was, Please use your new chair, and bring the old one in to have a little spa day with the sledgehammer so that the quick release wheel (and maybe the entire axle assembly) can get replaced.

Vince Lopez bending over a stuck wheel with its owner bending over to see the problem, liz laughing a bit in background

I adjusted the brakes and other bits of someone’s tall rollator, and Emma from GOAT and volunteers from Streets Forward helped to adjust the center of gravity (CoG) of another manual chair.

woman wearing a mask with tools working on a manual wheelchair with its rider consulting

My flyers promised cup holders, but I forgot to bring them!

I need to organize a much better, and smaller, tool bag for myself to bring to events. I am eyeing the kind that open up and show everything neatly stashed away. It would be nice not to have my tools “explode” over all the surface area of our work space!

Community strength was coming through in our event. We had some quality snacks and free coffee and tea thanks to the DCC. (Maybe I’ll come through and make cookies next time!!!) We were loafing on the couches, hanging out in the pleasant patio among the plants, charging up our powerchairs and phones.

two men, friends from the plaza, sit on the patio recharging their powerchairs and phones

For many years I have noted that when I talk with a wheelchair user about maintenance and repair, it is very likely to elicit difficult stories. My own nightmares are often about my wheelchair going missing or breaking underneath me. The stories people tell of stress, fear, pain, frustration, loss of independence, loss of their own health as well as mobility, from their chairs breaking, are of deep trauma.

With that in mind, what we are doing is healing for us as people, we are healing our own relationship with our tech and making something scary and bad turn to, I can even use the words joy or celebration. We did not fix every problem that afternoon. But we paid attention, listened, took notes, and got the ball rolling. We took something that feels like an unpleasant and risky chore that is disempowering, and made it a little party that helped us all feel agency and power and friendship.

I hope everyone will come back! Our next event is April 7 at the DCC.

That kind of community and solidarity is what we want to build!!!

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Sidewalk wheelchair repair job

Published March 5, 2026 by Liz Henry

You know how some people dream of their teeth falling out or realizing they have an exam they haven’t studied for and aren’t wearing any pants? My recurring nightmare is usually that I am traveling or at a conference or on a big campus somewhere, alone and a bit lost and my wheelchair either breaks or I realize it has just disappeared.

In these dreams, I am sitting on a sidewalk trying to figure out my next steps. I can walk a little, but only so far at one time and it is quite painful (like, maybe a block on a good day.) On my dream sidewalk I prepare to try and explain to strangers, in a language that I don’t speak, how I got there, that my wheelchair has gone AWOL, and what I need. Mercifully I also am one of those people who realize they’re dreaming, take control of it, and “lucid dream” or simply force myself to wake up.

Let me set the scene for you! It was a beautiful sunny day yesterday in San Francisco. I was on my way to do some errands yesterday and meet my son for lunch, looking forward to my little cruise around Noe Valley which has some cute shops and a Whole Foods. The bus stopped at my corner and the ramp was lowering. Beep beep beeeeeep beep, you know the drill! Then the heart stopping moment where my powerchair would not turn on. It threw an error. Yikes!!! I called out to the bus driver to ask him to wait. Restarted. Same error and then it shut off. More explanations as I beg the bus driver to wait for me to figure things out.

I tried taking my battery out, which is pretty easy for me to do but which was complicated my backpack and a big shopping bag hanging off the back of my chair. That didn’t help. A lady next to me who had her kid in a stroller offered help. I ended up putting the chair into neutral, and asked her for a push down the bus ramp. (Actually she started pushing me while I was still taking off the 2nd rear wheel lever which spun me around and kind of pinched my hand, but good intentions…) Victory, I was on the sidewalk and the bus was able to pull away.

a narrow cracked sidewalk with a stop sign (in spanish) pole blocking passage for wheelchairs

At leisure now, I could consider my options.

A) Call my partner or friends for help. My chair (a Whill Ci from 2018) is fairly easy to break down into three pieces plus the under-seat basket. They could load me and the chair into a cab.

B) The same, but I try to do it myself, maybe with the help of a random kind stranger or a hopefully willing Lyft driver. This is more difficult. Drivers likely to refuse.

C) Call a wheelchair van via Waymo, Fog City, or Uber. The Waymo and Fog City ones are cheaper. I would put the chair back into neutral and ask for a push up the ramp into the van and then get help once I was home. Complication, requires cooperation from driver.

D) Wait for my son, do our bank errand by him pushing me half a block to the bank, then try to get home via A or C with his help though he was busy with some important errands of his own.

None of those sounded great to me.

E) Text or call ILRCSF’s mobile rescue
F) Try and fix it myself

I went for those options, texting Vince that I don’t YET need rescue but I might within the hour.

Onward to beautiful, GOAT-like, Option F! Take all the million bags and backpack off the chair. Disassemble the chair. I am now sitting in a heap of bags, my walking cane, and wheelchair parts, and my TRUSTY GOAT FIX IT KIT toolbag!!!

And I’m googling “error code 00, whill ci”! Ok, check the electrical contacts, maybe it is the battery, I take out the battery and spit shine the metal a bit with the rag from my Fix It Kit. The battery housing also has two things that look kind of like spark plugs which can go out of whack, so I wiggled them around to teach them a lesson. Taking off the joystick controller on the chair arm sucks so I just wiggled it firmly hoping that would suffice if something inside was loose.

The problem turned out to be the point where the chair I sit in mounts on the seat pole. That has to be easy to take apart, but also, it’s where the electrical contact between the joystick and motor controller, and the battery and motor, lives! That thing is very oddly designed, kind of floating around not anchored to anything. I remembered suddenly that years ago it had problems which I fixed with some foam mounting tape. I unscrewed the housing of it with my HANDY GOAT FIX IT KIT SCREW DRIVER and stuffed a bunch of gaffer tape from YOU KNOW WHERE underneath the electrical contact. Then put everything together again.

Miraculously this worked and I was able to go about my day and also got to text Vince that I fixed it myself.

Interdependence is great, but sometimes I am so happy not to have to invoke it.

Brunch with my son was lovely. I had banana mascarpone pancakes with marshmallow fluff and bacon on the side.

Donate to GOAT today! $20 can fund a really good wheelchair toolkit that we will give to other wheelchair users for free, at our workshops and on the street to people we meet in our outreach rolls!

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