A lot of the time I get annoyed with the internet, but every once in a while, something comes along that makes me say, ah yes, that’s what this is for. It happened recently when NM’s editor, Ian Ruder, told me to check out a YouTube channel called Totally Normal.

Totally Normal is run by a guy named Dan Payton. He’s a power wheelchair user from a TBI who has incomplete C7-ish function and a knack for making DIY seem doable no matter what he’s modifying — a full-size touring bus, one of the 24 used power chairs he currently owns, consumer electronics or just about anything you can think of. He has videos of him pulling apart his brand new Permobil F3. One of him wiring a Honda generator on the back of an old Quantum 6000 to make “hybrid electric” power wheelchair. Another of him and a friend unboxing and testing a Chinese folding power chair that his friend bought from Alibaba [see Wild World of Alibaba, below].

The first power chair Payton can remember hacking is a Pride Jazzy 600 mid-wheel-drive model that he bought off Craigslist for $400. That last part is important. Payton’s rule number one for power chair hacking: “Just make sure you’re not using your only chair.” Better still, until you’re confident in your abilities, only mess with something that won’t make you sad if it breaks.

Finding a secondary power chair to mess around with doesn’t have to be difficult or overly expensive. Payton says he used to get most of his from Craigslist and now mainly uses Facebook Marketplace. He’s also found chairs at pawn shops and even yard sales. “Ebay can be tricky, because you can’t verify the chair works before you get it,” he says. “Usually, I’d only recommend buying a chair if you can actually go test it out and make sure it moves.”

Another thing to consider is the cost of replacement batteries. “I don’t care if they say the batteries are brand new, 90% of the time the batteries will be bad no matter what,” he says. Factor needing new batteries into your budget before you buy, and your only surprise should be a good one. There are a lot of used power chairs on the market and they don’t hold their value. Even if a chair is in great condition, you shouldn’t pay more than 20% of its retail value. And for something as your backup/hackable chair? “You should be able to get something functional for less than $1,000.” A complex, near pristine chair can run to $5,000 or more, but Payton says that for a used chair, anything being sold for over 20% of retail is overpriced.

Mechanical Mods

That first chair Payton worked on was a relatively simple modification. “I put giant tires on there because I wanted to go to the junkyard, and the crushed rock they use at the junkyard doesn’t work with normal wheelchair tires.”

He removed the front casters from the Jazzy 600, then used pieces of flat metal to make adaptors and bolted on wide, knobby ATV wheels to replace the drive wheels. He bought oversized casters and forks from Harbor Freight — surprise, surprise, these did not hold up — and swapped them onto the back. The results weren’t pretty, but they did let him move around the junkyard.

Other mechanical mods Payton has tried over the years include putting a pair of Honda mini-dirt bike tires on a Permobil C300 [see “Building the $91 Off-Road Power Chair”] or swapping more powerful motors onto the same C300, which is all good until you get overconfident and the chair spits you over on the lawn. He’s upgraded the suspension on old power chairs, added custom LED lighting to his Permobil F3 and built new foot plates for an Omegatrac.

Fun (and Danger) With Programming

From mechanical mods, Payton quickly learned about programming the electrical systems in his chairs. Once you attach the controller to a computer — sometimes this is as simple as loading setting onto a SD card and sometimes it can require a dongle costing as much as $650 — you can tweak everything about a chair’s settings from forward, rear and turning speed to acceleration and braking levels to seat recline or leg rest movement. If you have a seat elevator, you can change how the chair moves when you’re up in how-do-you-do-mode.

Manufacturers and DME dealers don’t want people programming their own wheelchairs because, well, they don’t want to kill their customers, get sued or cover repair bills. Power wheelchairs often have powerful motors, and tweaking settings could quickly send you crashing into or over all manner of objects if you’re not careful. “Knowing enough to be dangerous is definitely a thing with wheelchairs,” says Payton. Depending on the chair, you can fry the motors if you mess with the wrong setting or you could lock it out, leaving it unwilling to move at all. So: Tweaking programming is a do at your own risk endeavor.

But so is bombing a steep hill in your manual chair, and why should we get to have all the fun? If you want to be able to power drift through parking lot puddles or spin around so fast you hurl, hey, do your thing.

Payton recently found what he calls a “magic box” on his Permobil chair. It’s a port for an input/output module that lets you plug in up to eight different components. “You can do some really crazy stuff, like drive an RC car from your joystick or remote control your chair using an RC controller,” he says. Yes, you read that right. Payton has a video of him using a standard radio controller to drive an empty wheelchair around his house. Now that’s a gear hack.