Have wheelchair, will travel - real mobility for disabled motorists
Ready to slot into the driver's seat … Wally Bancroft in the Baribunma wheelchair he developed.
Photo: Peter Morris


IT MAY look like a super-comfortable go-kart. Or "a car seat on wheels", as he puts it. But Wally Bancroft's latest invention is a world first: a wheelchair whose performance has been proved by being fired at a wall with a crash-test dummy on board.

The tests were not designed to show what happened to the electrically powered chair if it crashed at high speed - its top speed is only 10kmh - but to test its safety and security when installed in other vehicles.

"We had to prove that seatbelts stayed in place, the chair remained anchored to the vehicle floor and that it retained its structural integrity - that it didn't smash apart."

Fixed to a sled, purpose-built from the floor of a wrecked Kia Carnival, the chair was catapulted into a notional "wall" - created by a piston system - at 48.5kmh, generating the required 23 G on impact. Kapow!

"I can tell you I was a bundle of nerves," Mr Bancroft said, recalling the 3.5 seconds of drama at the Roads and Traffic Authority's crash lab in Rosebery. "I think some of the blokes there expected us to blow their laboratory to bits."

Laboratory, chair and $600,000 dummy came through unscathed. The Baribunma wheelchair - named for the Aboriginal word meaning "to dream" from Mr Bancroft's Bundjalung dialect - was ready to roll.

Mr Bancroft's dream was to give the disabled greater independence by providing a fully transportable, height-adjustable wheelchair that fitted through standard doors, under desks and, more important, into any van and people-mover.

Previously, vehicles had to be expensively modified to take wheelchairs. Mr Bancroft's chair, which costs about $12,000, is simply slotted in to where the driver or front passenger seat was.

"Our view is, you don't rebuild the environment to accommodate wheelchairs, you build a wheelchair to fit the environment," said Mr Bancroft, 53, whose chair was launched this month by the NSW Minister for Community Services, Kevin Greene.

The chair is the culmination of several years' work by Mr Bancroft, a bush mechanic who trained as a boilermaker in Tenterfield, built cane-cutters in Bundaberg, ran a wrecking yard in Canberra and fixed motorcycles in Grafton.

At his Peakhurst workshop, he is restoring a classic 1942 Indian motorcycle, similar to that featured in the movie The World's Fastest Indian. It is a long-term project.

He was 10 when he was given the rusting wreck after changing a tyre on a 1928 Chevvy for an old man in Tenterfield. "I was pushing it up the hill to our house when someone yelled, 'Keep on going to the tip.' "

His interest in transport for the disabled was inspired by an association with paraplegic groups and by the memory of an increasingly immobile relative known in the family as "Cripple Uncle ****".

Mr Bancroft received research and development support from state and federal governments. As his fellow director Geoff Denyer explained: "An Aboriginal making something for the disabled? I thought there must be something in that."

Thirty patented wheelchairs, which can be customised with any kind of seat, are in production, and Mr Bancroft is exploring overseas markets.

Andrew Smith, of Blacktown, who has muscular dystrophy, is using the chair. At 1.98 metres tall he despaired of finding a chair that fitted under desks, through doors, into vans. Now he is driving around in his all-purpose seat. "I press the remote control, open the back door of my van, drive in, lock down and away I go," he said.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/...067277262.html