Icarus Fallen: The Hot Tub

The Gimp and his Gizmos – C

Ever since the accident that put me in the wheelchair I have been tempted by the hot tub on our deck. The tub sits on the deck with the rim 34 inches high. The seat of my wheelchair is 22 inches high. In order to get into the hot tub I need to raise my butt about a foot above the wheelchair and over the water and then get out reversing the process.

Initially we considered a standard Hoyer patient lift. There is a picture in an earlier blog. The problem was that the lift was designed to roll under whatever the patient wanted to transfer to (think bed). The tub sits off the deck and initially we thought that we could simply slide the Hoyer’s legs under the tub. Unfortunately a simple experiment found that there was not enough room for the legs to fit and that in any case the cuts required to roll the legs under the tub might weaken the entire structure.

What was needed was not a lift that rolled but one that stayed in one place and rotated, We tried, unsuccessfully to modify the Hoyer to rotate with the thought that the legs could easily bolt to the deck. Unfortunately the engineers who designed the lift would never allow such unsafe behavior.

I mentioned my issue to a friend and he had a great suggestion. He said he had a hoist designed to bring an engine into a pickup truck. It was very heavy duty, rotates 360 degrees and was a fraction of the price of the Hoyer. I found the device at a local tool shop.

The only problem was bolting it to the deck. My brother in law looked up the formula for torque and calculated the torque as 500 foot pounds – too much to simply bolt into a set of 2 x 4s . One idea was to bolt the lift to an iron plate and then bolt the plate to the deck. My brother in law was all for the lift but insisted on running 12 inch bolts through the mail support beams of the deck. He was doing the work so I was not about to argue.

My friend suggested a great metal market in the industrial section of town which was happy to sell us an iron plate exactly sized span the support beams of the deck. We then took the iron to my friend’s drill press and made holes for bolting the lift to the plate and the plate to the support beams of the deck. Finally we bought some 30 inch drill bits to make holes in the beams for the support bolts. By the time we had finished nothing short of destruction of the b=deck would move the lift.

Now it is time for a trial. I roll up to the liift in a house coat and swim trunks.

Next I lift while my wife places the sling under me. Then I hook the sling to the chains attaching it to the lift. The sling is the same one we got with the Hoyer patient lift.