PORT ANGELES — Three Port Angeles High School seniors teamed up this year to redesign and build a hand-powered cart they hope can change a life.
Shelbi Baublitz, 17, started construction of the cart last fall as her senior project.
“I wanted to do something with cabinet making and to help people at the same time,” said Baublitz, a student in the school’s cabinetry and woodworking class,.
Her friends Gunnar Eisele, 18, and J.T. Weider, also 18 — who are machine shop students — pitched in to help, with Baublitz cutting and preparing the wood for the cart’s body while Eisele and Weider built the steel frame.
The cart, designed for a person with leg disabilities, has hand pedals and a hand-brake, and can carry about 300 pounds, including the rider and groceries or other cargo or an adventurous passenger.
Baublitz sent away to a Spokane nonprofit organization called Personal Energy Transportation — or PET — for the plans to build the cart.
It was designed as an outdoor, stable passenger cart to be used in places with limited access to electricity and where roads or ground are too rough for a typical wheelchair.
PET describes the cart as “a lumber-and-steel cross between a tricycle and a SmartCar.”
The carts are shipped to countries such as Honduras, Uganda and Haiti, where they are given to people who have loss the use of their legs, or have limited use, because of birth defects, diseases or injuries, according to the group’s website giftofmobility.wordpress.com.
The cart will temporarily stay at the high school as an example and inspiration for other students to build more of the carts, which will then be shipped as a group to a place where they are needed, Baublitz said.
The cart can go off-road, and does very well in gravel, Eisele said.
Added Weider: “You can fit a lot of groceries in it, and can put a hitch and a little trailer on it, too.”
The cart has three wide all-terrain tires, a comfortable box seat, and is driven by a chain attached by a bicycle chain from the hand-pedals to the front wheel.
The students said they didn’t know how fast it could travel.
The frame design was a challenge, and there were issues with the handbrake, Eisele said.
Eventually the team completely redesigned the brake, resulting in some changes to the body of the cart, Eisele and Baublitz said.
The frame was decorated with multicolored handprints made by first-grade students from Dry Creek Elementary School.
Baublitz will enter beauty school at The Hair School in Port Angeles after graduation, and intends to become a beautician.
Woodworking was a pleasant hobby, but without the machinery students have available at the school, it will be a lot harder to keep up, she said.
Eisele plans to tudy machining and computer numerical control at Renton Technical College.
Weider plans to attend West Coast Training in Woodland to learn heavy equipment operation.
The trio’s work on the cart took place between class projects, in the students’ spare time.
None of them kept track of the number of hours it took to plan an build the cart, but it was “a lot of hours,” they said.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5070, or at arwyn.rice@peninsuladailynews.com.
