The Quest for a New Powerchair

If you are a regular reader here you will know that I like travelling abroad.

However, so far I have not travelled abroad in my powerchair for fear that it will be broken by baggage handlers, or it won’t fit in the aeroplane hold.

Unfortunately, wheelchairs seem to get busted a lot by airlines. According to data from the US Department of transportation airlines break an average of 25 wheelchairs a day.

I don’t want to land in a foreign country only to find my wheelchair is not in a usable condition.

It would be like arriving on holiday and then having your legs broken before you’ve even got out of the aeroplane.

So instead of taking my current powerchair, we started looking for a smaller one that can be more easily transported on planes.

A guy from Motus Medical came out with some options for me to look at and we liked the look of the Focus CR which is actually a lightweight manual chair.

This video shows a review of the focus CR:

The plan is to combine the focus CR with the E fix to create a kind of manual/powerchair hybrid.

The E fix consists of 2 electric wheels, a battery pack, and a controller. These can all be attached to lots of different types of manual chairs thus converting them into a powerchair.

Here’s a video about the E Fix:

The standard wheels on the focus CR will be removed and the E fix wheels will be placed on. A battery pack goes underneath and there is a controller which can be mounted in position for me to drive it.

I will be having a moulded seat on the chair – the same mould that I already have in my current powerchair – so it should be nice and comfortable.

And the great thing is that the E fix is designed to be lightweight and easy to transport. So hopefully before I take it on the plane we can dismantle it easily to reduce the chances of any of it getting broken by the baggage handlers. That is the theory anyway.

The electric wheels can be disengaged to convert them to manual if needed, so it gives you the ability of having a powerchair and a manual chair.

Even if they do manage to somehow break the powerchair components then I will still be able to use it (hopefully) as a manual chair.

The only concern I had about the E fix is that the wheels don’t seem to match the body of the focus CR. The focus CR is black but the wheels will be grey and white, so it might look a bit mismatched. But I will wait and see what it looks like when I get it.

I’m going to Sicily in October so hopefully the new chair will be delivered before then so that I can get used to it.

Have you used the Focus CR or the E Fix before? If so, let me know in the comments below what you thought about them.