Bill Overlock

When Bill Overlock retired and sold his Braun dealership in Winter Haven Florida in February 2008, he bought himself a retirement gift, a new 2007 Buick Terraza Entervan.

The 2007 Buick Terraza is the last of the Buick minivans. Several years ago General Motors announced it was discontinuing its entire line of minivans as a cost-cutting measure to help the company return to profitability. It's a shame because the Buicks were luxuriously equipped and worked well as a lowered-floor Entervan with a wheelchair ramp and kneeling system.

“It’s a nice van.” said Overlock “I’m still learning all of the features.”

The 73-year-young Overlock also loves to travel, so the OnStar system and the navigation system will be put to good use. He might even get to use the heated seats and mirrors when he visits his former home state of New Hampshire. Overlock tows the Terraza behind his motor home when he travels long distances. It's a good thing, because this summer he needed it for transportation while the radiator was being replaced in New York state.

When he’s not traveling Overlock takes care of his home and large yard and attempts to cross off items on wife Judy’s “To Do” list.

Overlock, a paraplegic since 1959, moved to Florida in 1974 to run a camp for disabled children. For the last 22 years he has put his talents as an electrician and jeweler to use in his business, Wheelman Enterprises. He sold and repaired wheelchairs, lifts, vans and other mobility equipment. He also did most of the installation work.

When it comes to his personal vehicles, “I guess I have always been a GM man” said Overlock. “I love the way it rides.”

May you have many more years of smooth rides my friend, and we'll look forwad to seeing you down the road.

Dirty Vans

My mechanic just got out of a van and looked at his pants. When he kneeled on the carpet, both knees became covered with a black combination of dirt and hydraulic oil from the wheelchair lift. It's just another day fixing lifts.


Over the years, we have seen it all and very little is good.

It's not just dirt or the occasional bag of fast food trash. We've found dead animals, dirty diapers, dog hair, leaves, hay, milkshakes left in a cup holder for two weeks, and, of course fecal matter. All of this attracts bugs who grow big and fat feasting on McDonald's leftovers, just like the rest of us.

It's not all dirt. Two older ladies brought their van into us for repairs. When we opened up the glovebox we discovered a half-kilo of marijuana.

Once we cut the steel side-wall of a rubber-wheeled trolly car and had a flood of water pour out of the supposedly enclosed compartment. This was followed by a plague of cockroaches surfing on the last of the water as it poured out.

More than once, a mechanic has slid into the driver's seat of a van or car, only to find himself sitting in a warm puddle of urine.

We understand everyone has problems and keeping a vehicle clean inside and out is difficult for an able-abodied person and even more difficult for someone with a disability. But, extreme sloppiness can cause many difficulties. Trash of all kinds can get caught in moving parts, causing motors to burn-out or wires to be pulled-out and short. Not only do mechanics not want to work on a sloppy, dirty vehicle, but they want to do the job as quickly as possible so they can get out of the mess. Service writers and mechanics usually look at a filthy van and assume maintenance has been neglected or the vehicle has been abused, and usually they are right.

It is rare that we encounter a zealously neat customer, like Swede Snodgrass. An ex military officer with MS, Swede would make his wife Ann spit-polish the van after every drive. Then, she would park it in the garage. A little tennis ball on a string hanging from the ceiling of the garage marked the exact spot where the van was to be parked.

Swede, we appreciated the effort.

OEM's Don't Make Accessible Products

Ford, Chrysler, GM, Toyota and most other vehicle OEM's (Original Equipment Manufacturer) don't make accessible products.

Most of them will admit that they don't make accessible products. It simply isn't possible to make one-of-a-kind items on an assembly line. Ford, the inventor of the assembly line, made all his Model-T's one color, black. You could have any color you wanted, as long as it was black. This product uniformity gave him the ability to reduce the cost of the cars and bring them to the common man.

Over the years, however, the car business has changed. Now manufacturers must offer dozens of colors, many different models, and meet complicated safety and environmental standards. Building a car is no longer a relatively simple thing. So, you would suppose accessibility could be built into new vehicles as easily as voice-activation or an MP3 connection.

Unfortunately, exactly the opposite is happening. Under the pressure of meeting federal safety regulations and avoiding potential lawsuits, the OEM engineers are running for cover. Every time a safety item is added no consideration is given to adapting the vehicle for use by a person with a disability. When engineers from the vehicle converters ask, they are told not to remove any of the safety equipment to do their modifications.

It is a never-ending Catch-22. Ford's Econoline series full-sized vans, GM's full-sized vans and Chrysler's Sprinter all have parked their airbag control systems under the front driver seat. As the result, adding a power seat base or removing the seat and modifying the floor so someone could drive from the wheelchair is much more difficult. And, all of the manufacturers don't want the control systems moved.

Ford has limited the availability of Econoline conversion-ready chassis for lowered floors. Ford also has added a new Roll Control System (RCS) to the Club Wagon version of it's Econoline series. In order not to interfere with this computerized stability system, Ford does not want tops or cargo doors raised. GM's large wagon, the Savanna, now has side impact airbags which cannot be removed so the side cargo door can be raised or modified so a lift with an upper support, like the Braun Vangater, can be installed.

The list of these problems is endless. The solutions are expensive. The guys who modify these vehicles to accommodate people with disabilities are forced to re-do the work of the OEM's and assume liability for the safety of that part of the vehicle.

This is an expensive proposition, and usually exceeds the $1,000.00 allowance the automakers give for modification assistance.

On top of everything else, the new hybrid, electric and fuel-efficient vehicles are not capable of receiving any extensive modifications, like a lowered floor or raised top. This leaves the severely disabled motorist with very few options, except to drive gas-guzzlers with expensive hand-made conversions.

This scenario will only change in one of three ways, a lawsuit against the OEM's, which is very unlikely, government assistance, or constant pressure on the manufacturers by disabled consumers.

My recommendation would be for consumers with disabilities to apply pressure to the automakers wherever possible. Ultimately, accommodating persons with disabilities will make their vehicles more friendly to use and increase their sales. In the end, they will be helping themselves, they just don't know it, yet.

Royce Mobile

The climax of many Sci-fi movies is the arrival of the aliens in their magnificent interstellar spaceship with its ability to move at many times the speed of light.

Lights flash and cascade across the ship, exhaust plumes explode from the engines, chimes go off, people run away or towards the phenomena. Then the door opens and a dozen or more bobble-headed pale white creatures exit down a cheesy $100 ramp made of expanded metal.

Not only is the spaceship ramp at an angle that would make it a suicidal ski slope for someone in a wheelchair, but it also looks like it weighs twice as much as it should for the application, not to mention its appalling low-tech look.

Back in the 1970's, people in wheelchairs had a similar, but much more sophisticated ramp conversion to use to exit their vehicles. Called the Roycemobile, it was a modification to the side cargo door of the 70's full-sized Dodge and Plymouth vans. The entire door became a ramp and descended out of the van to the amazement of on-lookers.

Royce International used either the side sliding door, or bolted the side swing doors together and removed the hinges to make a platform. They hinged the bottom and at the top they installed a motor with two long cloth straps on each side of the door. When the belts unspooled, the top of the door opened and slowly lowered until it hit the ground. The inside of the door became the ramp platform. It was covered by diamond tread aluminum sheets that slid to help reduce the angle of the wheelchair, but the sucker was still real steep. Outside, the windows in the door were protected against scratching and damage by clear plastic coverings.

Royce had slick, full-color brochures advertising its products. At a show or on first impression, they were amazing-looking machines, but after you looked at them for awhile you realized what a Rube Goldberg device they were. First, like most other devices of the day, there were no safety features of any kind. Second, the bottom hinge had a bad habit of breaking. And third, no matter how hard you tried, the ramp always seemed to plop down in poop or mud. Once you closed the ramp, these foreign substances would be sticking to the outside of the van.

One day in early 1977 I was answering the telephones when a potential customer called and wanted both a lift and a new door for their van. It seems that the Roycemobile door had fallen off at 45 miles per hour. Needless to say, what was left of the door wasn't worth picking up off the road.

This would all be funny if there had not been reports of injuries. A friend of mine fell from one of the steep ramps and broke her leg when her wheelchair went out of control. She had to sue a friend's insurance company to get the medical bills paid.

Mr Royce, the owner of Royce International passed away in the late 70's and his company died a short time later. The idea has never been recreated by anyone, although the motion of a lowered floor minivan ramp and the design of the Superarm Lift made by Handicaps, Inc., occasionally make me remember the Roycemobile.

It is, perhaps, appropriate to remember what has been tried in the past and failed gloriously. These stories give us a perspective on our industry and on what works and what does not work despite its "cool" looks.

Who is Working on Your Van?

Who is working on your van, or how do you know your wheelchair lift mechanic knows what he is doing, is a topic I have written about many times. That's because this topic never seems to go away.

I can think of dozens of stories about mechanics who had no business working on a wheelchair lift. These are the guys who put hand controls on backwards and call up requesting a hydraulic cylinder when they are actually working on an electric actuator.

How does the consumer stop this from happening to them? They take their van to a shop that has an NMEDA certification. The program, called QAP, requires minimum competency in many levels of installation and repair of adaptive equipment. It's also a sign that the owner of the company has a commitment to providing quality repair service to his/her customers.

If you are at a shop that does not meet any QAP or NMEDA standards, look to see that they at least have training certificates from the manufacturer. If you own a Braun lift, for example, or EnterVan, Braun Corporation requires training for the mechanics every three years or this business cannot be a Braun dealer.

The newer your equipment, the more you need good, trained, technicians. Modern lifts and wheelchair vans are crammed full of electronics. The guy with the test light and the bright idea that he can fix anything, is going to have a hard time fixing these vehicles. It takes training and experience.

Experience, however, is not enough. Many older lift mechanics have not retrained to be able to repair the new lifts being marketed since 4/1/05 when lift manufacturers were forced to make their products meet Federal Motor Vehicle Standards 403 and 404.

Recently, we've seen a trend where mobility equipment dealerships are bought and sold to other companies or a new person trying to enter this business. Even though this is a place you have dealt with for years, the experienced mechanics could be gone.

Just make sure you know who is working on your van. If you are not sure, contact the lift or van conversion manufacturer to find the closest service point.

Tires

If it has eight wheels, it probably has eight tires and tires can be a problem times eight.

My May 2008 New Mobility article is on tires and their importance when dealing with a modified vehicle.

Fortunately, the problems we used to encounter with tires on wheelchair vans have eased somewhat. I don't know how many times I drove vans that had tires worn lopsided, or square as I call it, despite my best efforts to have tires rotated and maintained. All of that stopped when I got my first UVL (under vehicle lift). We upgraded the suspension on my 1998 E150 Ford Club Wagon, stabilizing the vehicle, raising it, and making it a better van. Adding the larger springs stopped all the goofy tire wear problems.

Only years later did Ford recognize that their vehicles were too wimpy. In the 2007 model year they upgraded the suspension and made the E150 van as heavy duty as the older E250 one ton vans.

Road hazards still remain a problem. I wish I had a dollar for every piece of debris I hit. Fortunately, most of my tire repairs have been done in the shop, not on a busy highway.

When I was in college and living at home, my father used to borrow my pick up truck---actually it was his---to haul trash from the farm to the dump. This of course led to tire problems because of all the nails and stuff in the local landfill. One fine Spring day I came out of my class in college to find a flat tire on my truck. I called my mother to bring me the spare, which had been left at home, while I jacked up the truck.

By the time she got there I was sitting on the ground, waiting, with the damaged tire and my wheelchair sitting next to me and a small crowd of students and professors wondering what they could do to help. It was a picture she never forgot and always made her smile.

My hope is that if you ever have a flat tire, it can be as pleasant a memory as this one is for me.

KWB

Warranties

That old adage "just when we thought we had seen it all" applies to the next story.

We serviced a new wheelchair lift in our shop a few weeks ago. The critical front safety barrier on the platform was cut down from 5 inches to 3 inches by the installer so the footpieces of the customer's wheelchair could hang over the edge of the platform. Numerous safety features on the lift were removed and the lift was starting to lean out of the van because it had been installed so poorly.

The first thing we do when we repair a lift is find the Braun tag with the model number and identification information. On a good day, these stickers tell us everything we need to know about this lift, down to the last nut and bolt. They also tell us the warranty information for this lift.

Whoever installed this lift removed the tag, voiding the warranty. Without the model and identification numbers replacing cylinders, wiring harnesses and many other items on the lift becomes very difficult. Without the ID numbers we don't know if the lift is covered by its three year warranty.

After some investigation, it turns out that the installing dealer was not a Braun dealer and had bootlegged the lift from another dealer. When we find out who that dealer was there will be some screaming and consequences.

This is not just a matter of the customer getting screwed by two less than reputable dealers. Since April 1, 2005, wheelchair lifts for vans have been covered by the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, just like airbags, seat belts, and many other parts of cars and trucks. The installation of this lift was a federal offence punishable by a $1,000.00 fine per violation, and there may have been multiple violations.

Particularly sad in this case is that the consumers involved are an elderly couple who had been dealing with this particular dealer for years and trusted him. If they had done their homework and contacted the manufacturer, in this case The Braun Corporation, they would have found that the guy they dealt with was not a Braun dealer.

The mobility business and the business of manufacturing automobiles changes constantly. The consumer cannot assume vehicles, lifts, or dealers have not changed since they purchased their last adapted vehicle. After your vehicle is two or three years old, it is almost impossible to exactly replicate it down to the last detail. Always make sure you start from scratch and make sure of the fit and features of the hardware and with whom you are dealing.