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Category: repair

Repair hijinks report

Published February 21, 2026 by Liz Henry

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”.

a young guy with a screwdriver in hand, working on a mobility scooter that is levered up with a small jack.

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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Tune Up Tuesdays: Feb. 17th at ILRCSF

Published February 8, 2026 by Liz Henry

a colorful zine and some tools coming out of a zippered pencil pouchGOAT 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!

A longer guide covering wheelchair repair in the larger San Francisco Bay Area is updated regularly by the Center for Independent Living’s tech staff.

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!

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A Walk in the Park

Published November 25, 2025 by Liz Henry

Andrei hasn’t been outside in over a year. His secondhand powerchair needs a new micro joystick and other improvements, and that joystick will need new programming and a swiveling arm mount. From a chance contact on the r/wheelchairs Reddit forum, Grassroots Open Assistive Tech pulled together a team of disabled activists and experts who are working with Andrei to get refurbished, customized mobility gear to him in Moldova, along with an assistive tech expert to implement and test it.

Please donate to get Andrei back outside! He’d like to take his dog for a walk in the park!

Donations to GOAT this week will go towards Andrei’s project.

andrei, wheelchair user with dark hair, holding his dog Bobby

“After buying an electric wheelchair, my life changed dramatically. I felt a freedom I had never had before. I literally cried the first time I went outside. I was able to drive about 200-300 meters down the road. I was dizzy, but I was happy. I was no longer tied to the house and my room. Before that, I could only go out into our yard with its awkward slope and stand still, or 2-3 times a year I was taken along bad roads to the park or lake. I started going for daily walks with my mother, and then sometimes on my own. Those were probably the happiest years of my life.”
– Andrei

You can read Andrei’s full story in his own words along with more details about this project in a longer post: Let’s Get Andrei Rolling Again.

a man in a power wheelchair on the street, with a little dog riding in a backpack hanging behind him
Andrei providing taxi service for his dog, Bobby
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