An early problem of ALS: my feet were getting too weak to work the pedals in my van. There are companies that install hand controls, but besides being expensive, they require significant driver training from an industry certified teacher. Unfortunately, these teachers were in very short supply, booking start times many months out. My feet and drop foot were getting weak enough that judgment time for quitting driving was about, now! 

As it turns out, this certification is mostly to ease the liability of the providing companies, for the actual laws in Missouri that cover these things are rather vague and undemanding of proof of safety.

It took about three days of thinking and daydreaming about various designs, about sixty dollars of steel pipes and hinges from Lowes, some welding, and a couple of bicycle parts. It also took a willingness to drill holes in the dashboard wherever might be needed, and voila! Hand controls! 

It was a single bar with a mountain bike grip, horizontally sticking out past the steering wheel on the right side. Push down for gas, away from you for the brake. You could do both at the same time, but who would want to. Two hinges, welded together to make a Universal joint were bolted to the far side of the dashboard, next to the driver’s side door. Another hinge was welded to that steel bar, connecting to a second steel bar, going down to, and bolted to the brake pedal. The accelerator was a bicycle brake cable, also coming off of the main bar, going up over a pulley, then down through a new hole in the dash and connecting to the gas pedal.  Of course nothing is ever quite as easy as it sounds, but with only a small amount of adjusting, the contraption worked smoothly and well, though the “gas pedal” took a very light touch.

Occasionally, there are things in life that seem just too good to be true. This was one of those, for my step grandfather, having had a bout of polio in his youth, was the owner of a car equipped with hand controls. It was just about the time that I had gotten my driver’s license, when my step grandfather could no longer drive, thus needing chauffeuring. One could still drive his car with one’s feet, but why would a sixteen year old boy want to do that? It was cool and fun – look ma, no feet!

So of course, the newly invented hand controls in my van were fashioned to work in the same manner as my step grandfather, Luke’s. It was also a pleasure to find that the skills learned as a young man almost immediately felt as natural as they had almost forty years before.

Airplane rudders have a lighter touch than car brakes and when you push one in, the other one gets pushed out automatically, which would solve the problem of severe drop foot. Piloting was put to rest, however. ‘There flys a guy with adaptive controls for the disabled’, I have never heard. Seeing eye dogs, neither.  

Mary and myself. When I could no longer drive my little “go chair” into my silver Toyota van on the right, we bought the red mobility van on the Left. Unfortunately, my electric tricycle couldn’t fit in the mobility van, so we had two vans now. There were enough differences between the two vans, it was easier to start from scratch with the new controls yet using the same general design.  Photo: Laurie Skrivan, Post-Dispatch 

Another hobby that sprung into existence because of ALS, was go-cart racing. Many of my friends were kind enough to take up the sport because of my new condition. My friends are all racers and people who love to race tend not to worry too much about what they race. It was rough. It was raucous. One friend started bringing a life preserver to cushion the ‘rare’ impacts, for he had broken some ribs in his past. Towards the end of my friend’s foray in this wonderful experiment – finding new ways for me to be able to compete and participate in life with them – I couldn’t work the brakes, despite shoes being bolted to the pedals and a plethora of bungee cords. Luckily, spending my early twenties in dirt track stock car racing, three times a week, taught me how to turn the go-cart sideways whenever I needed to slow down…or mostly whenever I needed to slow down. I wonder if that’s why Jeff brought the PFD? Nah, couldn’t be that.

My off-the-shelf electric wheelchair. This was the indoor track that we used in the winter. It was the outdoor track at Gateway International that we preferred.
Sadly, I can’t find any pictures of the finished product. This is one of the photos taken to design what was needed for the go-cart peddles.

 

The gas pedal of the 2007 Chester mobility van, like all older cars, has a pivot in the middle. When you press down, the top of the part pulls back on a cable that goes up to the engine. One can attach their hand control cable here. The gas pedal on a newer Toyota van is just a joystick, in a way. There is nothing above the pivot except a plug, with some electrical wires connected. On this, it’s fairly easy to bolt an extension alongside of the part that sticks above that pivot, and thus gives the new cable something to pull back on. I would not use a cable for the brake system.