Making life better and easier sometimes requires looking at things you accept as perfectly ordinary parts of life and considering them from a completely different perspective. This post is about one of those things — the baby crib you may have slept in when you were little, and the one you may be considering using for your own child.
Category: Wheelchairs
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Trekinetic Comment
Mike Spindle, from Trekinetic, has responded to my post about the Trekinetic K-2 All-Terrain wheelchair. He writes:
. . . yes the customers do love it!
Some are in use as everyday chairs in countries as diverse as UK, Ireland, Wales, India, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Belgium, Australia and Africa.
It’s not just for offroad — with smooth tyres the FWD is fast too!
He also sent the excellent photo you see above. ‘Nuff said — a picture’s worth, etc., etc.
Ah, the Internet. The previous owners of my dad’s van live in a rather isolated hamlet of 400 or so citizens in a tiny county far from — well, most things. Including, significantly, a large market for a used accessible van. I couldn’t find a van in my densely populated suburban haven, but the World Wide Web rendered this geographic disparity irrelevant. Our sellers managed to sell a van they had nearly dispaired of getting rid of, and I acquired one I was beginning to dispair of finding.
OK, I won’t be objective about this. I’ve never used it; have never seen it in use; and have no idea if this particular wheelchair does even half of what the designers claim — or if it performs as well as they claim. But this thing is beautiful — more beautiful than any contemporary exotic car I’ve yet seen on the road. The design, and what it implies of performance, just takes my breath away.
After ploughing my way through the van listings in the entire USA on the Disabled Dealer website, I found an ad for a van in my state that looked right, and made contact with the owners.
After eliminating local dealers, it took another three weeks to work my way through the used accessible van ads on my local Craigslist. There weren’t a lot of listings on Craigslist during the period when I was looking, maybe no more than six or so, and I probably had contact with the owners — or putative owners — of a total of five vans. Having a long lead time for a search would definitely be an advantage. The pickings at any given time were pretty slim.
Only one of the vans I saw on Craigslist passed these preliminary screening described in Part 3 of this series of posts. It was an hour’s drive away, and my mechanic told me that I shouldn’t even consider buying it — it was a converted VW Eurovan — but I needed some experience in the actual process of inspecting a van, and took the trip anyway.
It was time to roll up my sleeves and get down to serious work. Buying an accessible van from a dealer wasn’t going to work for me and my dad, so this meant that I’d have to go elsewhere. It also meant a whole new approach. If I was going to buy from an individual, I needed a lot of information — and some way of screening out potential problems.
Armed with the information I’d learned in Buying A Used Accessible Van, Part 1, I headed down to the dealer.
For a while after my Dad arrived here on the east coast, I was able to use a Multi-Lift transfer system in my sedan to move him from his wheelchair into my car. When that was no longer practical, I began to think about a wheelchair accessible van. I’d seen them everywhere, of course, but had never really looked at them in detail, so I began by going back to the dealer who had sold me the Multi-Lift.