The Mountain Wheelchair project is no longer active. Seeing Ada stand up again for the first time, I turned my focus away from building the wheelchair to instead helping Ada to build up her health. She is still in a lot of pain and struggles on a daily basis, but... She has returned to school and achieved many A's/A*s in her GCSEs, takes "Outdoor Recreation" as one of her subjects, and is currently attending the Duke of Edinburgh Award. To top it off, she has since walked up the highest mountains in England, Wales, and Scotland!
As for myself, my energies are now going into delivering outdoor activities for Climb Wales where I get to help other young people (as well as adults) get out and enjoy the great outdoors. Primarily based in Snowdonia, North Wales, we work as mountain guides and also deliver a number of outdoor courses, such as:
Finally, a big thank you to everybody who supported the project. It gave Ada (and myself) hope, something to look forward to, when times were very dark.
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Just a quick update on differential mechanisms. In previous posts I’ve looked at different types of differential mechanisms such as geared differentials, and hydraulic differentials and various differential bars using ball joints. It’s since become clear how important weight reduction … Continue reading
Recently, whilst building the larger prototype, one of the things that has caused delay is one of 3D printers being busy with other projects and the other one completely out of action. I spent most of last week stripping it … Continue reading
The ball joints work!!! …sort of! (That’s becoming a bit of a catch-phrase!) The ball joints have quite a small “turning circle” and I’ve had to loosen the nuts on the threaded bar to allow the ball joints a little … Continue reading
Although I’ve been doing lots of research this week, it felt like not much tangible progress had been made. Frustrated, I quickly mocked up and printed a working differential bar which uses ball joints. As you can see in this … Continue reading
I have discussed previously the problems with the existing geared differential and after last night posting an update on possible solutions, I have made a working prototype of the linear bearing method: I’m actually very surprised how well it works. There … Continue reading
In a previous post I discussed a problem with the differential bar mechanism. Here I present two possible solutions. The first uses two linear bearings with a swivel joint between them: The second uses an armature with a ball-joint at … Continue reading
As mentioned previously, the existing rocker bogie design is working brilliantly: …however, I do forsee that it’s going to cause problems down the line. For one, with the weight of the vehicle and the sort of terrain it will be going … Continue reading
Few! Some progress was made today as I’ve just finished working out the details of how I’m going to mount a pair of syringes to the frame of the small prototype to act as a hydraulic differential. Just need to … Continue reading
Last night I said the next thing I was going to do was explore ball joints, but as I was sat at a desk in work with no access to the physical parts or CAD software, I started thinking about … Continue reading
Over the weekend Ada and I went into Colwyn Bay KTM and Honda to look at quad bike wheels and see what inspiration could be drawn. Originally I had in my mind that the wheelchair was going to use fat, … Continue reading