West Australian company gives paraplegics the chance to ride a motorcycle again

It’s a sad fact that if you ride motorcycles for any length of time, you’re more than likely to run into somebody who used to ride bikes but can’t any more due to catastrophic injury - often these are injuries sustained in bike crashes. I’ve known several ex-bikers who have sustained life-changing injuries through the sport, and a few common threads emerge: most have no regrets, most are getting on with life with strength and dignity, and most would desperately love to ride again one day. And not a trike, a proper, leaning-in-the-corners, motorcycle.

Whether or not they should ride again is one question - a question upon which these folks’ families would probably have a fairly firm opinion - but thanks to West Australian company Dreamfit and its founder Darren Lomman, paraplegic riders can now have a motorcycle retrofitted to allow them to re-live the freedom of the open road on two wheels.

The dreamfit retrofit addresses several different areas in which wheelchair-bound riders are compromised:

1) Gear shifting - normally the domain of the left foot, the gearshift system is fitted with a pneumatic ram operated by a compressed air system that lives under the pillion seat where possible. Thumb levers operate the ram to select gears in the same way as an able rider would with his or her foot. There’s also the option of fitting an RPM-dependent autoshift feature.

2) Braking - the front and rear brakes are both operated by the right handbrake lever in a similar system to Honda’s Combined Braking System. A knob allows the rider to select the proportion of braking force that is sent to each wheel. There’s also a parking brake to keep the bike steady when stopped on a hill.

3) Ergonomic support - without the ability to hold themselves on the bike with their lower body or stomach muscles, additional support is needed from the bike. Dreamfit achieves this by using a series of moulded plates to hold the lower body in place. Cup-style footrests similar to those on some bicycles hold the feet in place. Moulded ergonomic knee supports stop the rider from moving too far forward, and a specially designed seat with lumbar support stops the rider from moving too far backward, putting the upper body on a comfortable angle from which to reach the bars. All these supports are individually moulded for each rider. For paraplegics with lower back injuries that still allow some stomach control, it’s possible to use a less intrusive velcro system to keep the legs anchored to the tank.

4) Low speed stability - as these riders are unable to support the bike’s weight with theirlegs when stopped, Dreamfit designed a simple landing gear-style mechanism. Effectively, below a certain speed at which balance becomes challenging, a pair of stabilising wheels on steel struts descends to take the bike’s weight. Once the bike is moving again, the stabilisers lift up and out of the way.

Depending on the nature of the disability and the strength of the rider, getting on and off the motorcycle could be achieved in some cases entirely manually. In other cases, a slide transfer may be required, and in more extreme cases a hoist transfer would be needed from chair to saddle.

Dreamfit’s prototype bike is a CBR250RR, which Lomman put together as a university project after a chance meeting with an ex-motorcross racer in a hospital carpark. “I asked the guy how much he missed being around bikes,” says Lomman, “and he looked me in the eye and said if he could have one wish, it would be to ride again. It brought home to me how lucky we all are - you hear about people coming off their bikes at 200kmh and getting up with minor scratches, and somebody else will come off at hardly any speed at all and end up in a wheelchair.”

Lommar says Dreamfit are in the process of moving from effectively a small shed into a 2500 square metre facility: “So far, we’ve only been able to work on prototypes - the bike, a seated surfboard, a ski boat, a hovercraft - and development costs have been huge. But hopefully with this new facility we can look at taking these machines to production. We’ve had around 150 enquiries about the bike from all around the world. The interest’s there, the facilities and personnel are there and with the right investment we’ll be in a position to help more people. You can’t imagine the feeling you get when you tell someone their impossible dram isn’t so impossible after all.”

If there’s one person Lomman would love to get in touch with about the Dreamfit bike, it would be 3-time world 500cc champion Wayne Rainey, whose crash at Misano in 1993 left him paralysed from the chest down. “Many nights I’ve dreamed of getting Wayne on board as an endorser, or even just letting him take the CBR for a ride - but I’ve looked in the Perth White Pages and Wayne Rainey’s not in there. So if any of your readers have any idea of how to contact him, tell them to let me know!”

For further information on this inspirational project, as well as contact details for Lomman and the Dreamfit team, check out the Dreamfit website. We truly wish them all the best.

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