Coop was in industrial maintenance for three years. In his fourth year as a millwright apprentice he had his accident. His industrial experience helps him to live alone in the country. He doesn’t hesitate to modify his assistive devices, or any other equipment that he uses, to suit his rural surroundings. “You just look at [the problem], and think this is where I’ve got to go, and you just do it.” Since moving to the country, he has adapted and maintained his manual and power wheelchairs, snowmobiles, a tractor, a boat and his accessible van, among other things. Coop gets together with his friends, all of whom have their own areas of mechanical know-how, to work on his projects. For example, to make a more durable piece for his wheelchair, Coop designed the part, and then “hooked up with … a friend … in a machine shop [and] another friend at a foundry” to make it.
Coop feels that vendors who sell and repair medical equipment take advantage of their customers. “I think it’s terrible what they do. It’s way too much money for anything to do with health or disabilities.” He believes that by taking on his own projects, he will not only get the results that he wants, he will save money as well. “In all the product manufacturer surveys of users, the same complaints come up 90% of the time, but they still don’t fix the problems. By just scanning through the other stories, you can see the pattern clearly.”
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Coop uses a power wheelchair to work in his shop and to negotiate the heavy snowfall in his area. He admits he is rough on chairs, and he is very clear about what he expects from a power wheelchair. “I just want something plain, simple, solid, tough.” He thinks that his current chair is the best that was ever made, so he is willing to make extensive repairs on it. “I just got it back actually. I had to rewire it to eliminate the plug-ins so that there would be no problem areas for water to get in. I have another electric chair, a backup; it’s nice if you’re inside or maybe down in [the city] … where there’s no snow. I got ten feet out the door with my backup chair and that was as far as I got with it in the snow. But this one, well you can follow my tracks out of the driveway and down the road.” He also uses the chair to clear a path from his house to his workshop and the back deck. “I just put the shovel in front of it and away you go.” Coop has modified it a lot to make it more durable and to get him around in a rural environment. “The bottom of the battery case would sit in the snow and the tires would just spin, so you couldn’t go anywhere. Now I’m up four and a half inches higher.” He raised the body of the chair for more ground clearance by welding the larger hubs from the original wheel rims in the rear and making longer front “forks,” so he could put on larger front wheels and keep everything level. He then put snow-blower tires on the rear wheels for added traction. “Now I can go out through five or six inches of snow; it doesn’t matter.” In the summer, he changes over to turf tires for a smoother, quieter ride.
The power chair is also an important piece of equipment for Coop in his shop. “If you’re working in the shop, if you go to push on something [when you’re in a manual chair], you roll away. You need something that’s heavy enough to stay where you want it, especially if you’re lifting or moving heavy objects. If I’m going to be pushing or wrenching I need the chair to stay there.” Coop added a bracket to hold up the joystick because it was always breaking when he leaned on it while lifting or doing other work. “With this set-up I can move snowmobiles, boat trailers, anything.” Coop has also set the wheelbase to the shortest setting on his chair, “so when I turn around, I’m not hitting anything. If I want, I could keep the front end down, but my chair would be five inches longer, and I’d be hitting everything when I turned around. Besides, it’s fun doing wheelies everywhere.” The shorter wheelbase makes the chair tip back more easily, but he considers the trade-off worthwhile, because he can get around obstacles in his workshop more easily without his toes hitting everything.
Coop says that his chair is great for yardwork too. “Try using a weedeater or leaf blower in a manual chair—it’s nearly impossible.” Dragging out the garbage is also a lot easier since it’s quite a distance to the end of the driveway. And setting up the patio furniture or moving obstacles before cutting the grass is easier and quicker too.
Even though his chair is eight years old and no longer made, Coop would like to keep it for as long as possible. He has tried other chairs, but none seems to measure up. “Sure, I’ve had other electric chairs, and I borrowed one off a guy and they’re just terrible. You run into stuff.” When asked what he would do when he needed another chair he said, “I’d just go to [a vendor] and grab a bunch of pamphlets [and find a chair] like this—this is plain and simple. Like no cushion on it, or anything. Just give me the electric, and I’ll do everything else.” Or he would pick up a used one “since you’re going to have to change half of it anyway.”
Coop uses his power chair for outside yardwork and in the shop, but he uses a manual chair in the house. “Generally, I don’t drive it in here because the mess I’ve made. I usually just stay with the pushchair. I just leave the electric chair out in the garage, and that’s where the charger is set up.” He was prescribed only a manual wheelchair while in rehab because he had rented an apartment in the nearby city and had no use for a power chair at the time. Despite being rough on his equipment, he still has his original chair and brings it with him on his snowmobile when visiting friends. “It was strong. They made the tubing out of good steel. It got backed over twice by a car and still was in good shape. It’s gone cartwheeling a few hundred feet across the lake when it fell off the back-rack on my snowmobile. Even that didn’t break anything on it.”
Coop wanted his second manual chair designed to tuck his feet under the frame so he could get closer to objects like doors and counters. He went to a wheelchair vendor who supplied him with a couple of chairs to try out. When it came time to buy, the chair he wanted was not available, so he had to settle for his second choice. When he received the chair, Coop found that it was too small for him, so he modified it to fit by putting on larger front wheels and sliding the upholstery back as far as it would go. When he finished resizing, his legs stuck out just as much as they did on his old chair. He says, “[The wheelchair vendor] measures you all up, then sends away the specs to the manufacturer and then they just give you whatever. I don’t understand why they did all that measuring. I ordered the small nylon wheels but couldn’t use them because when the footrest was adjusted, the wheels were nowhere near the ground! That’s just one example.”
As well, his newest manual chair is not up to the demands that Coop puts on it. “I pound it up pretty good. The new one, it bent right off the bat.” One time, “[My friend] pushed me across the parking lot, but there was a curb and it was too high, and it just stopped dead and it bent again.” Coop thinks “it’s a piece of junk; it’s just cheap metal, that’s all.”
When modifying his house, Coop kept in mind that he might want to sell it to someone without disabilities someday. He left the upper kitchen cupboards as they were, even though he cannot reach the top shelves. He did change the lower doors from hinged to sliding and lowered his sink. He says, “If someone comes in, they just say things like, ‘that looks cool,’ but they would never think it was because I’m in a wheelchair.” He also chose not to have a lift or ramp to get into his house. Instead, he used interlocking stone to create a gentle slope up to the front door for level access. It fits the look of the landscaping and the house.
Coop believes modifications should be kept as simple and inexpensive as possible. “You just look and go, ‘this is where I’ve got to go,’ and again, you just do it. Like for ceiling fans, you just go buy a longer chain. It doesn’t take a genius or a big-money consultant to figure these things out.”
Coop has several recommendations for people wanting to live independently. He suggests using ramps instead of lifts wherever possible; they don’t have moving parts so costly repairs can be avoided. Pocket doors, which slide into the wall, are easy to use and don’t get in the way of the wheelchair, making them good for tight spots. For his hinged doors, Coop uses a small knob on the hinge side of the door so that he can pull it closed behind him. There’s no door opener to maintain and the knob is quicker and easier to use. He says that closet organizers are great and come in any size. They can also be removed if you relocate. On the deck railings he has hinged coaster wheels on sections at each end that can be swung open. That way he can push the snow straight off the edge of the deck instead of having to lift it over the railing. There are many other adaptations that come to mind for Coop but now, they’re just normal and he doesn’t even think of them until he goes somewhere else and they’re not there.
Coop uses a riding tractor to plough the driveway and mow his lawn. To keep his balance, he attached a seat from his boat. “Basically, what I did there was use a racing bucket seat out of my boat. It’s a wrap-around so it holds you in tight.” He also made the footrests wider “because when I’m transferring, my feet would fall down onto the mower deck.” He also attached a “speed ball” device to the steering wheel. With this, he can steer with one hand and use the other for the speed controls. The hydrostatic drive eliminates the need to use foot pedals. A small ramp against the garage wall allows easy access to transfer into the tractor seat. The canopy was only slightly modified.
Coop has several snowmobiles that he uses for racing, riding the trails and visiting friends. He wanted to be able take one of his manual wheelchairs on the back, so he bolted a bracket that holds the chair to a horizontal lift bar that is part of the snowmobile. The chair then hangs on the bracket, held with a large pin that slides through the frame of the chair. “If I’m going to somebody’s house, then you pull the chair off and you wheel into their house or garage.”
Coop doesn’t strap himself onto the snowmobile, “because if I hit something that hard I want to be off the snowmobile. I don’t want to be with it, if [I] hit a pressure crack in the lake or something. You could put something on just to keep your butt from sliding,” he says. He adds, “I know of one guy that put a large square of Velcro on his seat but I have a leather snowmobile suit and it sticks pretty good since I’ve got leather on leather. I don’t go fast on the trails anyway; you don’t want to get bounced off.”
For racing (on grass, water or ice) I’m making up brackets that can be put on or taken off. They will hold my feet securely with my knees tight along side of the gas tank.” He says, “You definitely don’t want to be thrown off at high speed. I spent the winter recovering from a crash in the grass last fall. Hopefully, this new bracket will solve the problem.”
Coop found his full-size van with a raised roof through the local used-car magazine. It had been modified for a passenger in a wheelchair, but Coop is able to drive, so he went to the firm in his area that specializes in van modifications to further change the van to suit his needs. He switched the power seat from the passenger side to the driver’s side, so he could correct the position of the seat while transferring. But the controls to operate the seat were in a bad location. “They put all the switches over here on the right so, wham, you hit them when you’re transferring out of your wheelchair. If you have kids or dogs, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Put them on the other side. No one’s going to be transferring from the ground up because they’re going to be coming in on the lift.”
Coop also paid the vendor to replace the flooring with marine-grade plywood topped with rubberized flooring material. “Again it’s here with the snow and slush. It gets wet, it swells and buckles, then your power seat doesn’t slide over top. This is what happened on my first van. I would have to duck my head because of the bump in the floor caused by the swelling.”
Coop also had trouble with the lift that came with the van. First, he has to start the van before he uses the lift, because the lift uses so much energy that it will barely operate on the van’s battery power alone. Also, the lift has caused him to get stuck in the van on a few occasions in winter. “It’s made to screw up basically, because it picks up the snow and sticks, and then it melts down into the opening, and freezes, then the door doesn’t open.” He recalls, “I can show you where I broke [the lift] to get out. It was an eighth-of-an-inch thick little plate. I had to push the door right through it to get out.” Further, according to Coop, the lift’s safety devices are substandard. He gives an example: “There’s a little sensor, like a little foot, on the bottom and it’s supposed to tell the lift ‘we’re at the ground now, stop.’ The bracket was so thin that it would just bend up and keep going. It lifted the side of the van up. So I measured it up and welded a stronger cover that replaced the original one. But even still, you’ve got to give it a hit every now and then.”
Coop also adapts and fixes his own equipment because he feels that vendors who specialize in medical equipment charge more money than is necessary. “They’re ripping you off big time. Because it’s either covered through [government funding] or insurance companies, so they just charge you whatever [they] want and no one ever questions it.” He also finds parts for his equipment at stores that do not sell medical equipment. For instance, he bought new batteries for his power chair at a local garage supply outlet for half the price that he would pay from a wheelchair vendor.
Coop does use a wheelchair vendor for repairs to his equipment that are too complex for him and his friends. His approach though, is to find a good vendor and stay with them, “because they know me, and yeah, you can get deals. If you find someone that’s good and you can trust, stick with him or her.”
Coop believes that when people who have spinal cord injuries move to a rural environment, or return to one, as he did, that standard assistive devices may not suit their needs. “You can’t just phone up some assistive device [company] and go, ‘Hey, this is what I want to do.’ If it isn’t in the book they’re going to charge you a million bucks and you still won’t get where you want to go.” He also suggests that to save money on repairs, stay away from the vendors if possible. “Just because it’s a wheelchair doesn’t mean you have to go to a wheelchair shop. If you want your spokes done, you take it to a bike shop…. If you’re going to drive down there and drop them off, then you might as well just … buy your tires and tubes from a bike shop. They’re sometimes half price and the tire selection is greater.” Coop feels that people should try to create solutions for their needs by using their own skills or those of friends. “By looking for ideas and inspiration from other everyday equipment you can usually solve your problem more quickly, easily and cheaply.”
His final words: “Good luck and have fun in whatever you do; it’ll make your life a lot easier.”
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