Bowhead, a company best known for adaptive mountain bikes, has released its first wheelchair. The Era features a molded carbon fiber frame and a host of innovations designed to make the Era more versatile and adaptable than any other manual wheelchair on the market.
The biggest innovation: The frame chassis and the seating system are two separate, interlocking pieces. The seating system connects to the chassis via a quick release mechanism, which allows you to break the chair into two pieces for lifting into a car or storing in an airline cabin.
It also allows for a high level of adjustability. “Being able to separate the geometry of the chassis and wheels from the seating and positioning, it allows for any combination of the two as we grow and design further [options],” says Tatiana Place, Bowhead’s product manager for wheelchairs. “We’ve designed every single detail of the chair so that if you do change the seat angle or seat width, that doesn’t affect what’s underneath.”
Other adjustments include 4 inches of continuous seat height adjustment, 4 inches of center of gravity adjustment and an “on the fly” seat back angle adjustment between 80 and 100 degrees. With that level of adjustability, the Era’s chassis comes in only one size — though a pediatric model and a model for bigger bodies are in the works. For Christian Bagg, Bowhead’s founder and a T8 para, having a base frame that’s compatible with a wide variety of body types is the only way to properly engineer a frame.
“If you’re making a custom chair every time, you can’t engineer that. You can draw it … but a CAD drawing isn’t engineering,” says Bagg. “Whereas with the carbon layout of our frame, just like a bike or a race car or an airplane, you can simulate it. You can test it. You can see where it cracks, add more material. See where it doesn’t crack, take material away. See where you want it to flex, or you don’t want it to flex. Then your chair has that [engineering], my chair has that, everyone’s chair has that. You can actually put engineering in now because it’s not changing every time.”
For Bagg, the other major benefit of adjustability is that it means you can stay in the same wheelchair for longer. “A custom chair is custom for the day you were fit for it. But my body is not the same as my body 10 years ago,” he says.
Your needs for a wheelchair might change from day-to-day or hour-to-hour, as well. You can quickly adjust the Era to accommodate a wider and taller pair of off-road tires. Or, with a unique axle add-on, you can change the camber to that of a sports chair with no tools required. “The whole change takes like 30 seconds or a minute when you’re first getting used to it, so now you don’t have to bring two chairs anywhere. It’s a way to get people out recreating and not having that big investment in time and money, because you don’t necessarily know that you want to play a sport until you’ve been able to try it,” says Place.
Bowhead plans to release more modular options — seating systems for sports and comfort, accessories for adaptive sports and to make off-road wheeling easier, cycling-inspired brakes — all of which will work with the same chassis. “There’s a lot in the works,” says Bagg. The goal, he says, is that “it fits your lifestyle and the things you do.”
The Bowhead Era is currently available for preorder starting at $7,999. Bowhead plans to start shipping chairs March 15.
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