Spring 2012 News Notes

Download your copy of the 2012 Spring Newsnotes here

Donate to Help Veterans

You can now make a donation and designate it for our VA Program. Whirlwind will make RoughRiders available to disabled veterans to test and provide valuable feedback through Veterans Administration (VA) hospitals around the country.   Donate Here

Your donation of $800 will cover the cost of one RoughRider^® for a veteran and a second RoughRider for someone in the developing world who otherwise could not afford one. Whirlwind will work with VA hospitals to identify well-matched recipients. We expect that the RoughRider will be well received, leading to VA purchases. And, by providing greater access to off-pavement adventures where most conventional wheelchairs cannot go, the RoughRider will open up more opportunities for veterans.

Bob Incerti, Whirlwind's SF Operations ManagerAs Bob Incerti, a Vietnam vet and Whirlwind’s San Francisco Operations Manager, puts it, “Returning to civilian life from the military is challenging. Returning with fewer abilities than you went in with makes the challenge harder. Having the right equipment can help veterans meet that challenge.”

“There are many wheelchair options—light, agile chairs for smooth surfaces, special chairs for various sports—that allow amazing participation. I often explain the RoughRider by saying, if I were to walk down a dirt road to a cabin in the woods with a road bike in one hand and a mountain bike in the other, the person in the cabin wouldn’t have to know anything about bikes to know that the mountain bike was more suited to their area.”

“I think of the RoughRider as the mountain bike of wheelchairs, allowing folks to get further down the road, where the fishing gets good and the woods are quiet.”

ASME Student Project

Members of San Francisco State’s Student Section of theAmerican Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) are working with Whirlwind on building a hand-powered front-wheel-drive tricycle as a club project. The club has been responsible for welding, fabricating, and contributing to the iterative design process through testing. “The team of undergraduate students is learning valuable skills to help their eventual careers in engineering,” says club president Nic Celeste, “while seeing first-hand how engineering and design can help make the world a better place for those with limited mobility.” The ASME Trike Project is overseen by Whirlwind product designer Aaron Wieler. It is one of several engineering and entrepreneurship projects that we are currently working on with students at San Francisco State, where our headquarters and shop are located.

Matt McCambridge (in picture on the left), Whirlwind’s Product Development Manager, works with mechanical engineering students Craig Brinton and Nic Celeste on an innovative trike prototype.

Expanding the Whirlwind Team

We have met some great people through our partnership with United Cerebral Palsy (UCP) Wheels for Humanity in Jogja, Indonesia and our manufacturing partnership with PT Dharma in Jakarta. Recently, Indriyanto and Maria (at right) joined the Whirlwind team to help with engineering and sales. Indriyanto’s background in large-scale manufacturing adds a unique body of knowledge to Whirlwind's technical team, whose experience is in small- to medium-scale shops. His expertise has already been a great help in delivering the quality we demand for our wheelchair users. Maria is helping Whirlwind find buyers in new markets and keeping orders on track.

Indriyanto and Maria (in picture of  the right) are setting up a UCP Kids chair during a wheelchair provision training by UCP.

The RoughRider Comes to the US!

Experience the outdoors like never before

Whirlwind is now taking advance orders for the RoughRider on our Buy One Give One (BOGO) program. Hundreds of wheelchair riders who have contacted us are excited about where they’ll go in their own RoughRiders.

The RoughRider was designed to handle rough outdoor conditions like the broken up sidewalks and dirt paths commonly found in the developing world. Its long wheelbase makes it ultra-stable on uneven ground, making the RoughRider great for touring National Parks or for weekend excursions. Watch videos of people out having fun in their RoughRiders in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

  "I looked up through the treetops and realized that I was by myself for the very first time, exploring a forest without fear that I would become trapped or that I would fall over on the uneven ground!"

–Bruce Curtis, Manual Wheelchair User for 45+ years