Hi, everybody. Ali Akbrian your resident road safety expert from mobility engineering, back again for another Q & A. Thank you very much for sending in your questions, keep them coming in and as I always say, with my trusty subscribe pillow, please hit that subscribe button down there somewhere and help us get to that thousand of subscriber mark we're inching towards the 500. So, let's celebrate it 500 and then when we get to a thousand, we want to get rid of this pillar and find somebody else. So, help us get to that thousand and we love your work for hitting that button down there. All right. Onto today's video. So, today's question, should I say on today's video, today's Q & A question is around stress, a wheelchair tie-down straps basically, the question is coming that says along the lines of I've tried my wheelchair straps down, or my client's wheelchair strips down and the location where we've got the retractor to where the thing connects onto the car, the strap hook connects onto the car means that the strap actually rubs and curves around the function of the wheelchair.


Is this okay? What should I do about it? So that's basically the question. So, what we've done is I've set something up here on out, training rig in mobility engineering at Hornsby assessment facility and training Regi. So, you can see basically what we're talking about. I've got one already set up there in the front at similar to what was described over the emails, which was basically a thing rubbing against the wheel and curving on the front there. I'll show you a similar kind of thing in the back. So, see, similar kind of thing in the back of this, what we do is we'll go through that and that would be the set up the top like that sometimes, or sit down like that. Now, if you actually go over the top of that and look there, you'll see that that is actually rubbing on the wheelchair they're like, sir.

So that's basically what, what the situation is because of that, we're not having a straightish line, but it's not straight and it's not okay for it to be rubbing. So, this is the situation that we have with this particular customer, something like this, and is this, okay? If it's not, what should I do? So, the first and foremost thing is that it's not okay, so we can't have our straps touching anything or impeding on anything and they need to be in a straight line as possible. The reason why is for basically two reasons, the first thing is when we're touching something, the car is moving and, and it's constantly vibrating. So why these are moving at a vibrating kind of, sort of a frequency if you'd like, as they're driving along the road thousands and thousands of vibrations a minute or second or an hour or whatever it is.


Over that period of time, what you'll find is you'll have a big wearing on the belt or wearing on the hook or wearing on the actual wheelchair. So that means damage and that means expenses and, you know, potential dangers as well. So that's not an ideal situation. The other thing is if it curves around something, or if it's not in a straight line, when we have an accident, as we've mentioned before we at roughly 50 Ks an hour, we have around about 20 to 30 times of force about the body. So, it's a very heavy force. We've got, a hundred and X kilo wheelchair, probably at one 20 to one 50 kilos wheelchair. That's going to increase its weight by 30. So, we're talking 3, 4, 5 thousand, and thousands of kilos, right? Moving forward and those thousands of kilos, what they're going to do is they're going to impact on this strap.


So if this strap is bent around like that, and thousands of kilos pulls on it, what do you think it's going to do? It's just going to pull it straight. So, anything that's in its car is going to be completely obliterated out of the way, basically completely destroyed. So, if you've got something that's curved around something, and you have an accident, the strap is going to straighten up. Whether you like it or not, anything in the way, it's just going to be flung out of the way or damaged or destroyed or whatever. So again, a very, very potentially dangerous situation. So, what do we want to do to do it correctly? So, what we want to do, I'll just demonstrate that for you here, just a little disclaimer, is sometimes these things do jam up a little bit, as most of you have probably experienced yourself. So, it might have a little bit of mucking around, but we'll, we'll get there.


So, what we want to do in the front case actually kind of hints us with the angles. So, this comes out on an angle like that and by the way, we want to big shout out to Sunrise Medical for the quickie wheelchairs. They provide us with some demo chairs for these videos. So big shout out to them. So, what we're doing here is we're sort of following the angle like that. We're locking this them in place, and then we're hooking that like so, now what we've got a nice straight line, not impeding on anything, and we're going to do the same thing in the back.


So, we're going to undo this one, bring it out and again, this comes in a nice straight line, straight back. So, what we want to do is sort of mount it somewhere in like that straight up, and then you can see that's a nice straight line. It's not impeding on anything and that's the ideal kind of setup you want. So, you can see that's going in a nice straight line out to the side there and in the back in a nice straight line, straight to the anchor point in there as well. This is typically the kind of setup that you want also in the event of an accident as well, because as you can see, things are nice and straight and as you're moving forward, also in an accident, if there's stress behind you, a straight and less on an angle, they're also just going to be a little bit better in the dynamics from an engineering point of view. I guess I'm just a little bit better. I'm not that much different. The main thing is that they should not touch anything and they shouldn't curve around anything. They should always be in a nice straight line, which you can see here is what we've achieved. So hopefully that helps and thank you very much for that question. Thank you for all of those questions. Keep those questions coming in and as we always say, hit that subscribe button down there and we'll see you next time.