How to make a LEGO Wheelchair Footballer

LEGO is great. You can make anything, right? Well actually, maybe you can. A friend of a friend has a son who uses a wheelchair, and he made it onto his local Wheelchair Football Team. As a surprise for him our friend enlisted our help to make a LEGO minifigure to celebrate his achievement.

You don't reinvent the wheel (or the wheelchair) if you don't have to, so to start us off we had a quick look around and there are lots of designs of wheelchairs that people have made using LEGO, and some of them are excellent, but we didn't see anything spot on for this young man's electric wheelchair.

My partner set to work and his initial design which was mainly to work out 'how it all came together' looked like this....version 1.

Once the basic shape is sorted out, it's all about refinement...

Now it really was starting to come together....and a bit of internet searching brought up photos of his team, so we could check out the kit...

It uses one 'illegal' technique (something that causes stress to a LEGO piece) to make the joystick on the armrest, and the rubber hose is strictly Technic and ours is a vintage part, but it's all LEGO, and his Mum made it all worthwhile by posting a thank you on Facebook...

So to the instructions......We actually created a booklet for our young friend, just in case his wheelchair footballer ever needed repairing. Each page shows the pieces required and how it goes on to the model - hopefully enough like real LEGO instructions that you have no problem following it!

These are the parts you will need.... (see bottom of the page for advice).

And the instructions....Emmet style....

A novice masterbuilder can easily play around and adapt the front to remove the protective bumper, or change the headrest or battery, or anything else so that your wheelchair can really be YOUR wheelchair.

We managed to find the pieces to make our wheelchair footballer, but we had to replace a couple of them because they were rarer and from sets. There are various places around the internet where you can buy LEGO elements individually, possibly the biggest and best known is BrickLink - an online market which is open to anyone to buy and sell their spare LEGO. It's where we've always bought our odd pieces of LEGO, and it's always been awesome.

Thanks to Brett for being lovely enough to think of the idea, and for asking us to join in....feelgood factor x 20.