by falco peregrinus » 23 Oct 2013, 14:30
Ex-Gooserider captured the essence of the issue excellently. I agree with all he says. Personally I would never buy a brand new chair - but I'm in the fortunate position of being able to strip down and rebuild a chair from scratch, replacing all components that I find faulty along the way. (For how much longer, I don't know. Have to wait and see.) Like you, I have to self-fund my chairs, so I try to get them at minimum price. Both my chairs were free, because they were so worn out that they were written off, but I was able to rebuild them both to satisfactory operational condition without spending a fortune on them.
Like Ex-Gooserider said, assume the batteries are stuffed and that you will have to replace them. Even if they weren't worn out by the previous user, they've probably been destroyed by sitting idle, flat and uncharged, for too long while the family decided what to do with Grandma's old chair.
One thing that Ex-Gooserider didn't mention - also assume that the bearings on the castors are all stuffed as well. They're relatively cheap things, but sometimes they're hard to get replacements for. You might have to look around and try numerous bearing suppliers before you find some. I actually encountered two bearings on my chair that were SAE internal and metric external diameter (or was it vice versa? No mater. How strange can you get?) Stay away from Chinese bearings. Get Japanese, if you can.
The other thing you have to watch when considering a second hand chair is slop between the drive wheel and the axle. I've seen some horrible mistakes made by professional wheelchair maintenance people in their attempts to quieten the knock that comes when the wheel starts to move on the axle, wearing out the lock key. Oh yeah, assume you have to replace the lock keys too. Don't try to buy replacement keys - buy a 25cm (or so) replacement lock key rod of the required dimensions from a tool supplies shop or engineering supplies shop and cut your own from it. And when you fit it, put a bit of Loctite on it (I forget which one it is - take a look at the Loctite range - there's one specifically designed for this sort of task), to fill the wear gaps caused by poor maintenance in the past life of the chair. The Loctite means you need a gear puller if you to ever want to get it off again, buy you'll almost certainly never need to ever get it off again if you Loctite it on anyway. (If you do wear out the motors so badly that you have to replace the motors, just replace the wheels at the same time if you don't relish removing a Loctited wheel from the motor axle. (I have done it a couple of times, but it isn't easy. If Pride used decent motors, you wouldn't have to Loctite the wheel to the axle to prevent the key and wheel hub wearing out.)
The other thing you have to assume with a second hand chair is that all the nuts and bolts and allen key bolts have loosened up and need retightening. Again, use Loctite, so the problem never recurs. (A low strength one will do the job in most instances, and low-strength will allow you to undo the bolt easily later if you ever need to. You're just trying to prevent vibration loosening things up, so low-strength is sufficient.)
And you should probably also assume that you'll need to replace at least the drive tyres - and replace the tubes, while you're at it. Use thorn-proof tubes, if you can get them. It'll take a bit of searching, but they are available in wheelchair sizes. At least, they are in the two sizes that my wheelchairs take.
If these things check out ok when you buy the chair, then put the money aside to replace them a little further down the track. These things I've listed are routine failures. (And when a bearing collapses, it can sometimes be without warning and it can leave you stranded when it goes.)
Oh, and of course you'll have to reprogram the wheelchair to suit your own particular requirements. There's plenty of info and resources for doing that right here in this forum. It's probably worth your while to thoroughly check out what everyone has to say about the various wheelchair controllers and how to reprogram them on this forum, choose which controller you want, and restrict your search to chairs with that particular controller. You don't want to get stuck with a chair that you can't get reprogrammed to get it just the way you want it.
Oh, and the general opinion of most people on this forum seems to be to stay away from Pride. I've got a Pride Jazzy myself, with a VSI controller, and I'm very happy with it (now that I've finally got it programmed just right!), but it was designed to maximise profits for Pride. The engineering design leaves a lot to be desired. It's not a long-life chair. But I know it, I've lived with it now for about eight years, and I know what goes wrong with them and how to fix them, so I'm ok with it.
Yes, you pay a huge premium to buy a chair brand new. I guess the ideal is to pick up a chair that the family is selling after Grandma died - quite often the family has absolutely no idea of the value of what they are selling in an instance like that. If Grandma hardly used the chair before she became incapable of using it any more, then you might pick up a chair in excellent condition for a really good price.
Falco.