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I madeded a thing!
So with the flare-up in my right arm, extended driving of my chair can get awkward verging on painful. Going around the house, or from the house to the car, is ok. Going on walks with Yahtzee? Not so much.
I can do limited steering with a stick (backscratcher thing) held in my left hand, but that only works for pushing straight ahead. Bike paths are seldom straight, and anyway my chair has some steering weirdness, and I was not really able to safely steer.
I needed something that was basically a stick with a closed loop on the end, so that I could manipulate the joystick in any direction. Something like a very long wrench, except wrenches are freaking heavy.
So I made myself something.
It consists of three things: a length of PVC pipe (1/2 inch diameter, I think), threaded at both ends; a pvc end-cap that screws on one end; and an eye bolt, similar to this. One of the people at the local hardware place where I got this stuff had a drill of the right size, drilled a hole through the middle of the endcap. Stuck the eye bolt through the hole, put the bolt on the inside of the cap, tightened, and then screwed the cap on the pipe.
Oh, and then penguin duck tape, to un-boring-ify it:
In use:
(right hand is kind of curled in, behind the joystick unit, and holding loosely onto the backscratcher stick that's resting against my leg. Left is in control of the joystick via Penguin Wand.)
Total cost: approximately $8, almost half of which was the duck tape.
I can do limited steering with a stick (backscratcher thing) held in my left hand, but that only works for pushing straight ahead. Bike paths are seldom straight, and anyway my chair has some steering weirdness, and I was not really able to safely steer.
I needed something that was basically a stick with a closed loop on the end, so that I could manipulate the joystick in any direction. Something like a very long wrench, except wrenches are freaking heavy.
So I made myself something.
It consists of three things: a length of PVC pipe (1/2 inch diameter, I think), threaded at both ends; a pvc end-cap that screws on one end; and an eye bolt, similar to this. One of the people at the local hardware place where I got this stuff had a drill of the right size, drilled a hole through the middle of the endcap. Stuck the eye bolt through the hole, put the bolt on the inside of the cap, tightened, and then screwed the cap on the pipe.
Oh, and then penguin duck tape, to un-boring-ify it:
In use:
(right hand is kind of curled in, behind the joystick unit, and holding loosely onto the backscratcher stick that's resting against my leg. Left is in control of the joystick via Penguin Wand.)
Total cost: approximately $8, almost half of which was the duck tape.
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