Knowing that my time is dwindling here, and knowing that with the power situation here, I may only have 5 days left where there is power at the shop… thats not a lot. So while still enjoying my time, I have begun to stress a little and really worry about not finishing everything I had planned to accomplish while here. Today didn’t help either.
When Ben and I met up with Daniel this morning, he told us there was no power at the shop. We decided to go in anyway and see what we could do. Halfway there, Daniel received a phone call telling him the power had turned on! We were excited, as we only had to put some finishing welds on the upper half of the chair… little did we know this would be a day long adventure.
When we got to the shop, we began by putting the brakes and quick release for the wheels on the chair. This took about an hour, but we knew we had plenty of time left in the day, so Hakuna Matata.
The chair folded nicely while tap welded, with a bit of contact with the slot which the armrests slide down, but nothing to really worry about. After putting the finish welds on, it took a great amount of force to fold, and we knew we had to cut and paste to make it work. We took the backrest and armrests off the hinges, and I soon realized many of the parts were off their mark, and that we had quite a heavy task in front of us. I will not go through all the things we had to fix, but we continued to run into problems. Not feeling too well (similar to last time I was sick), I became very frustrated with the chair a couple times and had to walk away from the work. I have never felt so defeated while working on that chair than today. Finally, after Ben and I endured hours of doing our best to weld and grind the parts to fit together properly without having to pre-load any of them, we finally finished with an acceptable chair. We noticed there was a tiny bit of contact with the right armrest that, at one point of the fold, caused some difficulty. We knew this would be an easy fix, but right before we began on that, the power shut off (at 5:35, and the power usually shuts off at 6, so I didn’t mind too much.)
Ben and I are glad to know we are close to finishing the chair. We are excited to design and build the jigs for our wheelchair, so that all the guys at Mobility Care have to do is build the parts in our jigs, and there wont be any problems while putting it together. We know tomorrow is a no power day, and Daniel will be traveling to Moshi. I plan on staying in the hotel and working on designing the jigs, so that they are easy to build when it comes time to do so.
We are also working on setting up a Safari to Ngorongoro Crater! His pledge brother is in the area working on a project of his own, and leaves on Tuesday, so we are trying to have an awesome weekend!
I have also put up the links on the photos page for my third week here, and the Massai Village adventure (minus the gory photos). Enjoy!
