GOAT is hosting two events this weekend!
The first, BARC or Bay Area Repair Coalition, is a half day summit for people doing hands on wheelchair and mobility gear repair in the San Francisco Bay Area. We’re meeting to get to know each other and get more familiar with each other’s work and our various organizations, and to talk about ways we can collaborate.
There are a lot of us, but we need more of us! We need training pipelines for people who want to learn to fix wheelchairs, whether as handy wheelchair users, as volunteers or as a career.
The second event is a last minute addition. With support from Open Healthware group from OSHWA, we are hosting a build party, to talk about making our own wheelchair designs.
We have a guest builder Erik Kondo from opensourcewheelchairs.org visiting from the East Coast (riding his own custom built Piper chair!), Dana Schwachman from Make Good with parts to build a 3-D printed Toddler Mobility Trainer, Ralf Hotchkiss from Whirlwind Wheelchair International, who designed the Rough Rider open source wheelchair, and (in)famous inventor and hacker Corbett O’Toole to talk about ways to use common things from the hardware store or salvage to build access hacks.
We plan to build a Piper and maybe a Half-Pipe chair, documenting and publishing our process and materials. Stretch goal, we may later come up with a quick online tool to re-size these chairs according to a person’s particular measurements.
Expect some fun pics from the wheelchair build party!
Dana with a half built Toddler Mobility Trainer:
The plywood TMT next to a 3D printed one:
Corbett in a fancy headshot:
Erik in his workshop:
Ralf in his workshop:
