Wheelchair Special Seating

Charlotte Moore #4

TeamGB Women’s Basketball

 

Charlotte’s father approached me 9 months before the Tokyo Paralympics with a challenge to design & produce a bespoke seat that would attach to the Matsunaga Sports Chair that Charlotte already competed in.

Charlotte suffers from scoliosis as well as being paralysed from the waist down and this made the standard seat unsuitable for her at competition level as it did not provide the necessary support during the game.

I had previously been involved in special seating projects for quadriplegics whilst making artificial limbs in the 1980s and realised that a similar solution was required.

The challenge though was to maximise support whilst keeping the weight down and enabling a simple but strong attachment to the existing aluminium frame of the sports wheelchair.

Without giving away too many trade secrets, we went from life-casting to thermoplastics and grp to produce a supportive, comfortable & strong set-up that ticked all of Charlotte’s boxes…except one - weight!

The final prototype, even with many tweaks still weighed over a kilo and I was determined to reduce this.

It was then that I approached Ryan at Clan Composites Ltd. via a mutual friend whom I had worked with in MotoGP.

Ryan immediately grasped the problem and after seeing my moulds agreed to create a Carbon Fibre support to replace my rather industrial polyester GRP version. He squeezed this job into a hectic schedule and the resulting CF piece landed at my studio 5 days before Charlotte had to fly out and only 2 days before her final practise session! Ryan’s work was flawless and not only clearly stronger than my GRP piece, it weighed significantly less enabling the total special seat unit to weigh in at approx. 800 grammes. Less weight means more speed for Charlotte!

Although the team didn’t medal, Charlotte’s performance didn’t go unnoticed and she has been signed up for a year’s contract with a professional wheelchair basketball team in the Spanish League!