Carlow IT graduate will host Ireland's first ever mountain bike meet-up for wheelchair users

Tullamore man designed and built a mountain bike for wheelchair users

placeholder image — Tullamore man designed and built a mountain bike for wheelchair users

Shanghai-based Tullamore man is the brains behind unique design-and-build project

Tullamore design engineer Noel Joyce will host Ireland's first ever mountain bike meet-up for people with disabilities in the Slieve Blooms on Sunday.

The wheelchair user, who works as an assistant professor at the NYU (New York University) Shanghai, has masterminded the design and construction of Adaptive Mountain Bikes (AMB) and he and three others will take to the trail at Kinnitty.

The former Defence Forces soldier, who has been paralysed since a mountain bike accident in 2006, has been working on the AMB project for a couple of years.

Successfully bringing the hand-powered bike project from a design concept to reality has meant that Joyce can return to the sport he fell in love with many years ago. Now, with more bikes available he can also share his passion with other wheelchair users.

“Up to this point I was the only person in Ireland who was doing this sport. And because I've built another couple of bikes I reached out to a few people and a couple reached out to me and I said let's meet up and you can try out the sport and get an idea of what it's about and perhaps get involved in it.

“It'll be the first ever adaptive mountain bike meet in Ireland. A group of us have gotten together so I'll no longer be just the one eejit to throw themselves down the side of a mountain any more.”

Joyce is now an experienced AMB cyclist and is able to tackle the challenging slopes but he appreciates his guests on Sunday will require a more gentle introduction.

“These are all people who've never done it before so I don't want to bring them up into the mountains too far. There's a lovely trail right beside [Kinnitty Castle] that's for mountain bikes so I'm going to bring them there so they can learn how to use the bikes.”

A graduate of Carlow Institute of Technology and an award winning inventor, whose prizes include the coveted James Dyson Award, Joyce began teaching at NYU Shanghai after a stint in Shenzhen, China with a start-up accelerator.

He has built up connections around the world and is especially proud that four AMBs have been built at four different international locations, Shanghai, New York, Abu Dhabi and here in Ireland.

The bike frames were all manufactured in China but after that each one has been tweaked by those working in the different cities.

“The bikes themselves are all pretty much the same, there's a few little differences between them. The idea behind that is proving that you can take this open source design and build it anywhere in the world.”

Open source design means that the blueprint for building the bikes will be free of charge to everyone.

“Anyone that wants to get the files and build their own bike can do that. I don't want anything for it,” says Joyce.

“I feel like a lot of people with disabilities don't have the money to spend on the ones that you'd buy normally for the region of €20,000. So if people have the files and can find somebody to help them build one that's going to be a third to a quarter of the price. That's the objective of the project.

“It's prohibitively expensive to get involved in the sport in the first place and then if you didn't like it you'd have spent €20,000 and it's hard to get rid of them. The way I'm going about it is help people to build the bike, they can try the sport, if they like the sport then that's great. They can upgrade the bike to be more capable after that. They don't have to spend a lot of money to build the first bike.”

Building the bike in the first place is important but as any road cyclist or mountain biker will attest, ongoing maintenance can be even more important.

Joyce crashed an earlier version of the finished product he will unveil this weekend and he was very disappointed at how long it was going to take to get it repaired, mainly because of a projected delay in sourcing parts.

“The bike got broken,” he says. “When I got the price and the timeline it felt hopeless.”

He points out that time is more precious for a person with disabilities because the toll a sport can take on the body is often heavier than it would be for an equivalent able-bodied person.

“A lot of people with disabilities don't have the length of time to enjoy the sport. I know that my clock is ticking faster than others,” the 44-year-old remarks.

“It's more to do with your body deteriorating when you've a disability and you wouldn't be able to do the same things. When someone tells me that it's going to take six weeks to make a part they might as well be telling me six months. That's why I decided to design the bike myself and make sure that parts can be got in no more than two or three weeks, if even that.

“The purpose of it is that people with disabilities don't have to rely on the factory. I should be able to get my bikes fixed as fast as someone who goes into [their local bike shop].”

He is so keen on ensuring the AMBs are accessible that he is lining up sponsors who will help place a bike at up to eight mountain bike trails around Ireland, beginning with Kinnitty.

“So anyone with a disability can take this bike out and go for a spin in the woods. It'll be free.”

His goal is that anyone with a disability will be able to enjoy the mountains in the way he does.

“It's good for your mental health, it's good for your physical wellbeing to get out and do exercise. When the one means to enjoy it is so expensive and so prohibitive, it's so heartbreaking. When you're out in nature you go out and forget about everything else. I always feel a million times better when I get back. Even if I go out and get drowned with the wet it doesn't matter.”