The Mountain Wheelchair project is no longer active.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.
Here it is, the first full size prototype of the wheelchair seat:
I realise that it looks just a slightly scrappy ;) but that’s fine; this is just a tool for collecting measurements for the actual mountain wheelchair.
I can then take photographs and measurements and use them in the 3D environment to make sure the mountain wheelchair concept drawings have the correct dimensions:
Getting the correct dimensions for the mountain wheelchair
The next step is to tweak the design to suit and then, carrying on with the pvc pipe, continue building a life-size model of the wheelchair.
It’s difficult in a college with so many levels of command to get things done at times, but two weeks ago I submitted a request to take the Engineering students up Snowdon to take some measurements. I think the boss must have pulled a few strings because I got the go ahead far quicker than is normal and having met the group on campus before the sun had arisen, we made our way to Llanberis earlier today.
The forecast wasn’t entirely accurate as we had a headwind for a significant part of the day and it rained on the way down. Amongst the group there were blisters, self-doubt, and moments of disorientation, but they made it, they made it to the top of Snowdon. I’m really proud of you guys, not so much for making it to the top, but for the positive attitude throughout the day.
And what’s more, we collected all of the data that we needed; measuring all of the obvious obstacles and then every single one of the final steps to the summit. That in itself deserves a pat on the back. With this data collected we can now build a scale model of Snowdon’s Summit (As well as some of the other obstacles) which we can use for testing prototypes.
I know that when I got home I was shattered, and I imagine the group more so, but as I opened my front door, elation! The motors had arrived. Be sure to watch the motors in action, but first of all, here are some highlights from our Snowdon trip:
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