Hal is a self-described “car nut.” He says, “I’ve always been interested in automobiles and that kind of thing.” Not surprisingly, Hal was an auto mechanic before his injury. Nearly twenty years after his spinal cord injury, Hal is now a successful businessman who consults with auto racers who want to improve the performance of their cars. He lives with his wife and their one-year-old twins.
Hal also races trucks and enjoys working on them in his home garage. In working on his own vehicles, he finds that his best assistance comes not from technology but from good planning, particularly making sure that the right tools are close at hand. As Hal puts it, “You don’t want to get on the floor and find out that that 7/16 wrench you had is not the right size.”
Hal is by no means anti-technology, however. He uses a wheelchair, hand controls on his vehicles, adaptations for racing, and a number of “time-saving, energy-conserving” power tools. Hal works hard to find efficient solutions—when he decides not to use some device, it is often because it would chew up too much of his time to use it on a regular basis.
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At first, Hal was determined to go back to his work as an auto mechanic. He says that the idea of returning to his former job “wasn’t warmly received” by his boss. He began to realize that it just wasn’t going to be practical for him to return to work as a mechanic because he couldn’t do things as efficiently after his injury. He even lost interest in cars as a hobby for a while. He remembers how he felt: “You get to that point where you’re basically sitting there in this room and there’s nothing on the walls, there’s nothing on the floors, the ceiling. It’s an empty room. And you’re looking around like well, jeez man, at least there’s room to move. So you just start to go out from there.”
“Going out from there” for Hal meant puttering around and “getting his hands dirty again.” When he did, he said to himself, “Ah man, this is good. This is a good time. Let’s get back into this again.” He rebuilt the motorcycle that he had his accident with and sold it. He put the money he made into a car that he was working on at the time, and that’s how he started “slowly getting back into car stuff.”
From there, Hal immersed himself in an engineering program, which kept him very busy for a number of years. With his knowledge of cars and his knowledge of business, Hal was able to start up a company part-time to cater to the mechanical needs of racers. In addition to consulting services, his company sold high-end, performance-enhancing car parts. Within a few years, it became a full-time job and his main source of income. Hal’s success was the result of the know-how that he had built up over the years, or as he puts it, “having enough of a knowledge base that you’ve got something to sell that people need.”
As a small business owner, Hal puts in long days. He estimates that he works ten hours a day, five days a week and another six hours on Saturdays. He adds, “And there’s always administrative work to do, so the business uses up a lot of your time.” His approach is to make the space as accessible as possible and keep assistive technology to a minimum. He says that the “best assistive device” is his employees.
The store is set up with lots of open space so that he can work independently with his customers. There is also “good access” and “good parking.” He does have to keep products on high shelves though, higher than he can reach. Real estate is expensive and most buildings have eight-to-ten foot ceilings. So for shelving, “you have to go up and not just spread [inventory] around” to minimize the amount of floor space you are paying for. As a result, some of his inventory is out of his reach, but he has employees to get things for him.
When asked if he would consider using a stand-up chair to reach the higher shelves, Hal comes back to the issue of efficiency. He explains, “At the store we’re really busy, so I haven’t got time to be cranking up and down on a stand-up chair to check to see if maybe that’s the part and compare it with another one and say ‘No, this isn’t going to work’ and then move down four feet, and then do it again.” Hal says that over the years he has just developed a pragmatic and efficient division of labour. He says, “You know, I do what I do best—I’m at counter, I’m on the phones and doing my thing, and I’ve got other people over there that are running around and doing that type of work for me. And that works really well.”
Hal satisfies his desire to get his hands dirty by working on his own vehicles for drag racing. He finds that good planning helps him deal with the difficulties of working from his chair. He says that doing this kind of work with a spinal cord injury means, “there’s a strategy involved with everything.” For example, “If I head out into the garage and I figure, okay, I’m going to take the rim out of the truck. You know, because I worked on automobiles an awful lot before I had my accident, I’d say, well, I think I should have this thing in under an hour. And my brain’s still thinking like I’m walking. And then I realized that, three-and-a-half hours later, I’m still taking this thing out. And you just have to deal with that—that’s all.”
Hal also had to devise strategies for the heavy lifting that is sometimes required in repairing cars. He used to rely on friends to do this, since they were hanging out with him in his garage “60 to 70% of the time” anyway. But now most of his friends have families and busy lives of their own. They can’t always be there to help him. Nor does he want them to be. Hal says, “I hate getting on the phone and saying, ‘Hey, can you come over here and give me a hand?’ You know, ‘Put this engine on the stand,’ or whatever. You know, I don’t want to burn them out.” Instead, he bought a small crane for lifting heavy objects and has an idea for adapting a Hoyer lift for the same purpose. He would use the Hoyer lift’s hydraulic arm, but plans to take parts from an electric wheelchair to put the lift on a mobile base. He says, “The drive and the remote [will] have a leash on it with the remote, and I’ll just be able to lift up the component off the floor … to the bench. And then with the joystick from the control from the electric wheelchair, we’ll just walk the part over to where we want it and back and forth.”
Of course, nothing is heavier than the vehicles themselves. Hal has built some specialized dollies that allow him to move vehicles around in his 26-by-28 foot garage. He explains, “At any given time there are two vehicles in [the garage], so we have built some dollies with some over-sized wheels on them, so we can place the vehicle on it. I can jack a vehicle up, put it on a dolly, … tie it into the corner and move it around. So as I’m working on them, I can actually move the vehicle around myself. Once again that was just a matter of making do with a limited amount of space.”
In an ideal shop with lots of ceiling space, Hal would install a hoist that would allow him to get under the cars easily. “That would save a lot of time,” he notes. It would also save a lot of energy and wear and tear on Hal’s body. Because working in his home garage is a hobby, Hal tends to do it in the evening. By that time of day, he says, “I’ve only got maybe about five or six good floor-to-chair transfers in me. And then something starts aching or getting sore you know, because it takes a little bit of effort to drag your carcass up off the floor into your chair.” Hal notes that all of these transfers have taken a toll on his body, especially his shoulders.
Hal races some of the vehicles that he works on in his garage. He explains that the essence of drag racing is to “start from a dead stop and try to accelerate as fast as you can in 1,320 feet.” Generally, the whole exercise takes about 11 seconds. The skill involved comes down to Hal’s mechanical ability to fine-tune the car’s engine and the transmission, his reaction time, and his ability to steer when racing the car. Hal explains that the shifting is controlled by a microprocessor so he is “basically just holding it to the floor and steering until it’s over, and then shutting it down…. Because the transmission is shifting itself, I just have to keep the thing straight. Because sometimes it gets squirrelly. It wants to go sideways on you, so you’re kind of like steering yourself out of it.” Hal is also quick to point out that the microprocessor technology is available for everyone, “walking or non-walking” and that “it’s all above board.”
Hal used his engineering skills to adjust the hand controls for better performance. Because the point of drag racing is to accelerate as quickly as possible, the driver has to hold the brake down until the car’s engine is operating at 3,000 RPMs while it’s sitting on the starting line. Hal operates the hand controls with his left hand and steers with his right hand. He explains that he has a twist grip for the gas, “which is really inefficient,” so he is constantly trying to adjust it to improve performance. In the upcoming season, they hope to have developed a new control that will need very little effort to apply the throttle and a “very short throw to the brake. So everything’s quicker.” By this Hal means that, “instead of having to push the brake back … and pulling it back 12 inches, [I’ll] be able to pull the brake maybe five inches, and it will be really easy.” He further explains that he will change the throttle so that he squeezes it instead of having to twist it about 200 degrees. He says, “You know, these are things that will be easier on my body and will speed us up.”
For safety, Hal is planning to put a five-point harness into his vehicle. He explains the how and why of this idea: “I’ll have two over-the-shoulder straps that are strapped into a lap belt and then it has an anti-submarine belt coming up the centre, so that I can’t slide forward out of the seat. And then it’s going to give me some more lateral control so that … if things get squirrelly, it’ll keep me behind the wheel…. Sometimes the vehicle … wants to fight a bit. If it’s coming out sideways and it hooks, it’s going to really throw you. You really get tossed around. And then you’re totally relying on your arm muscles to try to keep yourself in the seat.”
Another device that keeps drivers in their seats is called a six-point roll bar, which is made up of two sidebars that come down on either side of the driver. For Hal, however, a full six-point roll bar would actually be a safety hazard. He explains, “It would be a lot harder for me to try to get myself out of a truck [in an emergency] with a door bar coming up from my knee to my shoulder.” However, the association that oversees drag racing requires that drivers use at least a five-point roll bar. Hal’s solution: “I’m going to leave the passenger side door bar out so that if I have to … I can get out.”
In a similar vein, Hal also has to consider the issue of his legs going into spasm while he’s driving—an issue he has not completely addressed yet. He says, “Ideally you’d like to strap these guys [his legs] right to the seat too just to keep them from doing anything inappropriate at the wrong time.” But it is not a good idea to tie himself in too much in case he has to get out quickly for some reason. Hal is working on a solution.
Hal’s wheelchair is another consideration. He says, “I usually try to keep my wheelchair inside the truck with me.” If the racing stops for any reason, for example, “a blow up on the track,” Hal doesn’t want to have to sit and wait for someone to bring a chair for him. He compares himself to the Peanuts cartoon character Linus, who always has his security blanket with him. “I’m not really too comfortable with this thing [his chair] getting too far out of sight…. That’s my legs, man.” However, the regulating body for drag racing requires that drivers not keep loose objects in their vehicles while they are racing, for obvious safety reasons. So Hal is working to “come up with a restraint system for the chair” in case something happens that causes the vehicle to roll or turn over.
Hal derives a lot of satisfaction from drag racing. He describes it like this: “The part that I enjoy about it is taking a 3,500-pound clump of metal and seeing how fast you can make it accelerate. And when it’s all over, then I go, ‘Wow, you know, we did that with this.’ That is cool. And then you come home and you say, ‘What do you want to do now to make this thing run better and faster?’ And then you come up with a plan and you make it happen…. When you build your own car and you thrash it mercilessly for three days and it does fifty passes or whatever, and the thing’s still holding together and you go wow…. And then you say, ‘Well, that’s a reward in itself.’”
Hal’s participation in drag racing is also important for his business. The races are an opportunity to showcase his company’s work. Hal explains, “Because people are looking at our machine, … we’ve got to be, you know, romping out there.”
Hal has also been an example for others with injuries. He recounts one particular story: “I remember last fall, we were racing in Wisconsin and we had just unloaded our truck … and a woman walked up to me and she says, ‘Am I ever glad to see you out here…. A good friend of mine was in a motor vehicle accident about four years ago and he used to come down here racing before his accident. He was down here at the track all the time … and he hasn’t come back since.’ She said, ‘Do you mind if I take a picture of you and your car and I’ll let him know.’”
For everyday use, Hal drives a truck. Hal is planning some changes when it comes time to get a new vehicle, because the truck doesn’t meet the needs of his newly expanded family. Hal explains that because they had twins, they have ended up with “two separate vehicles…. If one [kid] had shown up, that would have changed things somewhat.” But as it is now, they don’t all fit into his truck and he can’t drive his wife’s car because he can’t get his chair into it. “We can’t really go anywhere together as a family comfortably.”
So for his next vehicle, Hal is considering buying a four-door pick-up truck or a van. One thing for certain though, “the next vehicle we get will definitely be lowered.” Hal is convinced that he is having shoulder problems because he is “jumping into a truck two or three or four times a day, and getting in and out. And it’s just a lot of load to lift.” If he gets a van, he will consider getting a swinging lift for getting his chair into to the vehicle. He calls it the Tarzan chair, “one of those swinging vine things.” Generally, Hal is not interested in using mechanical and electrical lifts because, like the stand-up chair, he finds them slow and inefficient. But this particular kind actually appeals to his sense of efficiency. He says, “It doesn’t use up all the floor space. It’s compact, it’s quiet, it’s light, it’s quick.”
When Hal and his wife moved from an accessible apartment to a house, they were looking for something that wouldn’t need a lot of modifications. Hal says that his house is not perfect, but for a home built in the 1950s, it leant itself well to his needs. He was able to handle the renovations he did need with the help of his friends. Hal says, “We didn’t have to call anybody in to blow the doors down or open things up or flatten things.”
Because Hal finds lifts and elevators inefficient, he didn’t install them in his home. He says, “If I want to get moving, I want to get out the door and in my truck and gone…. Getting out of this house for me is quick and easy…. I don’t have to shackle up and strap her down you know.” So Hal’s house has what he describes as a “very mild, minor ramp to get up to the front and a very minor one on the back. And we built a deck on the back of the house that goes right around to the side to the doorway, which is a level entry as well.”
The bathroom needed the most modification. There was a storage closet next to the bathroom, so Hal took out the wall and doorway and made himself a large bathroom, almost ten-by-ten feet. The bathroom is big enough that they can keep the washer and dryer there, so Hal has easy access to those too.
Hal transfers in and out of a regular tub without the help of grab bars. He hasn’t really considered putting bars in at this point, because he finds he can transfer without too much effort. He says that if that should change for any reason, for example, if his shoulders start to complain about the transfers, he would simply get a shower chair. Hal’s philosophy is, “If you need something you get it. And until then, you don’t need it, I guess.” On reflection though, he admits that the improved efficiency that a shower chair might bring has some appeal. He jokes, “I could just bolt one of those right to my butt and then I could knock … a couple hundredths of a second off. I’d save all kinds of time in a year.”
Hal’s twins are now one year old. He recognizes that as they get older, he may want a floor between them and him, “at least some of the time.” Perhaps at that time, he would prefer a house with a basement, which he doesn’t have now. He is not too worried about it though because he feels that “kids jumping up and down is a good sound.”
To make sure that Hal would be able to look after the kids, they bought fairly low cribs with a side that drops down so he has no trouble getting them in and out. He changes their diapers “wherever they are, the couch or the bed or whatever,” though he sometimes wishes they had a low change table. He finds that when he is bending over to reach them on the couch or bed, “there’s a threshold at which your body starts rolling over. So you know, a change table would be probably a good thing to have.” They don’t really have the space for a change table in this house, but if they decided to have more children, he would consider getting one. To get them in and out of the high chair, he can “coax them” onto his lap and move them from there.
Despite his minimalist approach to his own assistive technology, Hal’s advice to others is, “If you’ve got things that can make your life easier, use them.” He recognizes that “some people take to adaptive devices quite readily and some people are very resistant to using anything at all. I guess that if that’s part of your learning curve, then that’s just the way it’s going to be. But I’d advise anybody to make use of the stuff that’s around you.” In particular, Hal recommends that people have a look at using technology before they get into retraining or changing careers. Obviously “it depends on exactly what you were doing beforehand, but slight modifications to a workplace might make it possible for you to get right back into your job.”
Hal’s other piece of advice is to be persistent. He says, “I wasn’t really designed to go around in a chair, and the world isn’t really built for that. So every day you encounter something…. If I was up and walking around, this would be a lot easier a game sometimes, just getting stuff done. But you know, you’ve just got to keep ploughing, that’s all.”
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