Jeff Galli

It took about eight months to decide which power wheelchair to get for Jeff. Considering that his entire active life will be spent in a chair, the choice was important. There are some marvelous devices out there, looking very trim and very sharp and very high tech and elegant. We decided to get none of those.

Being a teenage boy, with all of his old appetites intact, Jeff decided to get a brute of a powerchair that is rare, not particularly pretty, but aggressive. It is the sports utility vehicle of powerchairs. No, it is more than that. It is the Humvee of powered wheelchairs. It is the assault vehicle of wheelchairs. It is the kind of chair you would go over a cliff in.

It will roll through potholes, it will roll over rocks, it will roll over curbstones…and it will keep on rolling long after it has hit a bump at speed and catapulted Jeffrey thirty feet in the air. That’s why we strap him in.

It is a bit noisy, but that just means you can hear it coming and move aside. You better move aside.

The co-designer of the chair is a young man named Jim Finch, who is a quadriplegic. He was 14 years old in 1978, when a drunk driver slammed into the Finch family car, killing Jim’s younger brother, and breaking Jim’s neck. Dissatisfied with the chairs that were on the market, Jim and his father Tom began designing a new chair in 1990, and in 1995 they started the TEFTEC Corporation and introduced their first chair.

Most of the major manufacturers have adopted a standard configuration for their powered chairs. They make them as small and as light as possible. Each of the two drive wheels has its own electric motor. It is tough to keep the two wheels turning in phase, and most power chairs are notorious for turning off-line when traveling over slanted or uneven ground. Try crossing a steep driveway at an angle, and you may find yourself jerked down and into the street.

Teftec built its WmegaTrac® with a true automotive-style transmission, so the chair tracks straight across even steeply inclined surfaces. The suspension is independent at all four wheels; and Jeff's model came with adjustable pneumatic shock absorbers that not only smooth the ride, but also allow the front and back of the chair to be raised and lowered independently. The drive wheels are massive, and all the components are overbuilt. The early model of the chair that Teftec uses in their crash tests is still running, and is still used as a sales demo at shows.

The Teftec site is crammed with technical information, and a long article about Jim Finch.

Jeff operates the chair with a joystick mounted just in front of his mouth. Using his lips and tongue, he can vary the direction and speed of the chair. A sip-and-puff tube mounted nearby is used to switch between other functions, so that he can tilt the chair back about 60 degrees; raise or lower the independent front and rear pneumatic shock absorbers; or turn the head and tail lights on or off.

If you see a young man in a wheelchair climbing over a fence to get to the baseball field, that will be Jeffrey on his WmegaTrac®. If you have some stumps you want pulled, make him an offer.