The Mountain Wheelchair project is no longer active.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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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 more freedom. There are ways to overcome this though and this will be my next update. Ultimately though (and bearing in mind I’ve done no research yet) I’m leaning towards hydraulics.
Working Differential bar:
In other news, I’ve popped the big question!
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 are some weak points in the joints but this mostly related to it being a very rough prototype and could easily be overcome. As I say though, it’s actually working far better than I thought it would.
Still, I like the idea of using ball joints because I could just buy one off the shelf and this would save complications in manufacturing and make them easier to replace if they fail.
In fact, purchasing a pair of automotive Sway bar End Links, or Stabilizer Bar Connecting Rods would vastly reduce the amount of work that needs to be done. They’re also tried and tested on road-going cars so should be perfect for this application.
