How to make a start with wheelchair maintenance
Understanding how to look after your wheelchair and make necessary changes can be essential in enabling your wheelchair to do its job in getting you around.
When I first started using a wheelchair, I relied heavily on wheelchair services to take care of all of the repairs. While that’s what they’re there for, it’s not always ideal.
Don’t get me wrong, the guy used to come out to do home visits and was very friendly. Most if not all the time (if memory serves) he had the parts to fix my chair.
It is inconvenient to be waiting around at home for someone to make the repair so I would often go to a local bike shop and pay a fiver for changing inner tubes when needed. Not much money, but an additional expense all the same. One of those additional costs of being disabled that is often talked about. You can read more about that in the Scope report here.
Difficulty levels
Much like wheelchair skills, you can break wheelchair maintenance into various levels of difficulty. As I’m a manual chair user and my experience lies there that’s what I’ll be focussing on in this blog. Though I’m sure that the same thing could be said for power chairs.
For all of these pieces of maintenance, if it’s something that you can’t do on your own then it’s still useful to know so that you can instruct a family member or friend to help out.
Where do you learn these skills though? I’ve never seen any courses taught on wheelchair maintenance and every time I’ve wanted to know how to do something I’ve always looked at YouTube for the answers.
There can be crossover with other sports or industry so if you can find a wheelchair maintenance example, try focussing on the repair issue itself. For example, if you’re looking at changing a tyre or tightening spokes then it might be useful to search for videos to do with bikes.
What tools are you going to need?
There’s a chance that you got a set of Allan keys with your wheelchair. If not, then it’s something worth investing in as they are incredibly useful, along with a Philips (cross head) screwdriver and a spoke key used to tighten the spokes on your wheel. All of these are easy to find at most hardware and bike shops.
Keeping your tyres pumped up will make it easier for you to push. Having semi-inflated tyres will mean that your pushing isn’t as efficient as it could be and you’ll be wasting energy.
I know keeping my tyres topped up to the correct pressure something that can easily slip my mind, I’m sure it’s the same for most people as we all have a million things going on. But when I top up the air in my tyres, it’s noticeable how much easier the pushing experience is.
There are a couple of pumps that you can use with different power sources.
Car pump – this is a useful option because when you’re sat in the car you will be out of your wheelchair anyway and turning the tyre round to get to the valve will be easier
Mains pump – before last year, I hadn’t had a car in about 12 years so I found an alternative in a pump that plugs into a mains supply that I could use at home
Battery pump – I only started using one of these last year when teaching how to change a tyre in a wheelchair skills session and they are a very portable option if that’s what you need
Some basic bits of maintenance
So you’ve got the equipment you need and want to do some maintenance but not sure where to start? Let’s have a look at some maintenance that you can do at home with what tools you have and what you can do without tools.
1. Tightening backrest
2. Tightening seat
3. Pumping tyres up
4. Cleaning casters
5. Move axle
6. Tighten spokes
7. Change inner tube/tyre
There may be slightly different ways to do each of the above depending on the model of wheelchair you have. Manufacturers websites and YouTube are a good place to start if you would like to see how things are maintained on your wheelchair model.
What are you going to try?
There are varying stages to wheelchair maintenance, and it depends on what you feel comfortable doing. There’s so much to learn and wheelchair maintenance (and modification) goes beyond what I’ve covered in this blog. I’ve not had the need/desire to learn how to weld yet but who knows what I’ll need to fix in the future.
Hopefully in reading this blog you’ve seen what a range there is in wheelchair maintenance going from tightening straps up to using power tools. It’s great to have these skills to keep your wheelchair operating smoothly so you get on with those things in daily life.
