Monday, April 12, 2010

wheelchair update

I ended up buying an e-bay wheelchair-- the TiLite TR that was a demo model in a showroom. So far, it's been ok. It arrived and I quickly realized that the 8 degree camber on the wheels prevents it from getting through the door to my bedroom. So I had to order a new axle, which isn't here yet. And then the foot rest was too high, so I adjusted that (had to go buy a new set of allen wrenches to get the 1/8" size before I could make the adjustment), and then realized that the 6 inch front wheels (which I really liked), were then too big and kept bumping into the footrest, making it really difficult to turn. So I took off the front wheels from my old wheelchair and put them on the new one and now it's working better. It's drifting slightly to the left, which may be because the front wheels are not really made for the casters that came with the chair. It still doesn't handle as well as the old one, but maybe the new axle assembly will remedy that. We'll see.
I guess I could have paid another $1500+ to get a chair totally custom made for me, but I still think this was worth it. We'll see. I hope it doesn't give me as much aggravation as the last one did.

2 comments:

Kelly said...

I hope it works out well..sounds like you've got a lot of tweaking to do still. Good job on attempting to get this one to do the trick.

Mama said...

Those Grandpa Hansen genes saving the day once again :) I'm proud of you!