Hi everyone, we've just had a really exciting delivery
and if it is what I think it is then it's something we've been waiting for for a long time
It's me! And we've got some paper...
A lot of paper. This looks more like it and a wheelchair. We're really excited to finally
have it, it's something we've been waiting a long time to get so let's have a look. So here she is,
looking very shiny. So this is the new wheelchair, this is a custom monoshock chair from hands-on
concepts and over here modelled by Claire we've got my old wheelchair which is a Quickie Argon 2.
So some of you will already know about this wheelchair because we've shared it on Instagram
and we've already had quite a few questions from a few of you asking what we think about it,
but here on this channel we don't like to do a review on a product until we've tested it
out properly. We like to test things out over a few months or so so that we've got a chance
to learn about any potential pitfalls or any positives that you don't notice straight away.
So because of that we're not going to be reviewing this wheelchair today, we've only just got it,
however we will come back and do a review in a few months time once we have learnt a lot more about
it and we've got a much better feel for it so that we can actually give you a proper accurate review.
So starting with my old wheelchair the Argon 2. I've had this for about two years now and
only because i've had it this long I felt comfortable enough to go for this one where
I could customize pretty much every single aspect of it. This wheelchair is a great first wheelchair
just about everything is adjustable but there are some things which I just didn't like about it
so it felt like the right time to upgrade. And I just want to shout out to Colin who helped me a
lot along the way with choosing what I wanted on here and giving me advice. This wheelchair
is made out of titanium and carbon fibre. Titanium is very strong, durable, lightweight,
hardwearing and corrosion resistant, so hopefully this wheelchair is going to last a long time.
The biggest reason for getting a new chair was to try and help with Craig's posture.
So this wheelchair just has a flat base and this backrest whereas if you look at this one,
you'll see that the seat pan slopes down and then it goes flat and that's called ergo seating
and we're really hoping that that will help to keep Craig's hips in position and help him to sit
up a bit better and to be able to balance and lift his hands up without falling forwards. And the
other thing about the seat which is different to my old wheelchair is we've made the seat pan out
of carbon fiber instead of out of upholstery. Now one of the big drawbacks of the upholstery base
is that over time it can sag into the metalwork underneath which can be really bad for pressure.
On the Argon 2, I had a tension adjustable backrest this was fine at first but it very
quickly wore out. The backrest pole started poking through the material and the padding
went completely flat and this started giving me a bit of a pressure saw on my back. So on the
new wheelchair I've gone for a rigid contoured backrest. This will hopefully be a lot better
a lot more comfortable and give me a little bit of extra support. So that's the first and biggest
change we've made to this chair. As we mentioned, this chair is a monoshock chair, it actually has a
suspension component built into the underside of the wheelchair. If i go over a bump or something
it will soften the blow but it does add extra weight. I was going off-road a lot constantly
going over bumps and this was sending quite a lot of shocks up my back in the old wheelchair.
So we thought it was a really good idea and particularly when i'm going out on my Batec you
know going over these bumps at quite a reasonable speed that should help soften a lot of the blows.
And while we're talking about the Batec, another change I made... Oh, the Batec!
So one thing that we've got on this is we've got this Batec mount here welded right onto this bar
of the frame. On the old chair the Batec mount was an extra bar which was attached to the chair,
so having it welded directly onto the chair means that it's lighter weight,
it's stronger and it can also be set further back which is better for Craig's legs.
Having a custom wheelchair meant I could make some big improvements to the footplate.
Firstly I made it longer which means my feet are a lot better supported.
Secondly, on my old wheelchair, I had a calf strap which held my feet on
this was fine at first but over time it became tatty and stretched which meant my feet kept
falling off the back of the footplate. So on the new wheelchair, I have a metal bar around the back
which should keep my feet on a lot better. And thirdly it is still compatible with the freewheel.
So for those of you who have seen our freewheel review video, you'll know that the most annoying
thing about the freewheel for us is the way that it mounts to the chair when you're not using it.
It comes with a little attachment which lets you hang it on the back of the chair,
but in our experience, this is absolute rubbish, the freewheel will just wobble
around and sometimes even fall off as I was going along. So since hands-on concepts are
really good at designing custom things we asked them if they could come up with a
better solution and this is what they came up with. It's a really simple design, it is
essentially two metal bars held together at the same width as the footplate and what this means
is that the freewheel can just be attached onto these bars in the exact same way that it attaches
onto the foot plate. There are a couple more differences between this chair and this chair,
one of them which you might notice quite easily is these side guards here that are fixed in place
so they don't they won't flex out into the wheels and they don't fall off and get lost and
generally be annoying. Another big upgrade we've made on this wheelchair is the brakes.
So what we've gone for on this wheelchair are scissor brakes which just push on and clip off.
These ones are metal instead of plastic so they should be a lot more hard-wearing
and should last a lot longer before I have to replace them. Another upgrade we made was the
castors and forks. Not only are they blue, but they're also frog legs. Frog leg forks
are supposed to have a little shock absorber in them which smooths out the ride as you go along.
One request I had for Craig's new chair was in regards to the folding back mechanism.
On the old chair it had this really horrible string which always used to snag and it was so
hard to fold it down when I was trying to put it in and out the car. So I asked if you could
get something with a rigid bar instead that would be much easier to fold down.
And one final customization we've made to this wheelchair which is quite uncommon
is to add a pair of removable aisle chair wheels to the back. So the reason we've got these aisle
chair wheels is for the camper van that we're building. So in the campervan there's a really
limited amount of space and we basically wanted to make the walkways as narrow as possible so that we
could maximize the amount of storage and stuff that we've got inside the campervan. So by using
these wheels here we can remove the big wheels from the chair and that makes the wheelchair
a little bit narrower so that Craig can still get up and down the camper van but we can also
have a lot of space. If you've got any questions about this wheelchair then feel free to leave them
down below. As we said earlier we will do a full review on this in a few months time but if you've
got any questions in the meantime then feel free to ask them. Yeah, so I'm really excited to try
this new wheelchair out and hopefully it does everything that we want it to, fingers crossed
but you'll find out in a few months. Thank you for watching and we'll see you in the next one.
Bye