A Guide To Wheelchair Tires

A wheelchair consists of several different parts, all of which work together to give you increased mobility and independence. Of the many different wheelchair parts, tires are perhaps one of the most significant parts.

Wheelchair tires are extremely important parts of your wheelchair as they determine the smoothness of your wheelchair, they affect the maneuverability of your wheelchair and determine whether your wheelchair will be easy to control or not, and they also impact the speed at which your wheelchair will travel. Thus, as wheel chair tires can have a huge impact as mentioned above, it is important to choose them properly. Here is a look at the different types to help in this regard.

Wheelchair Tire Types

1. Pneumatic Wheelchair Tires: These are filled with air. These tires are very light in weight as they are air-filled. They afford the maximum smoothness to a wheelchair and are also best as far as maneuverability of the wheelchair is concerned. However, these tires have their disadvantages too. As pneumatic  tires are filled with air, they can get punctured easily, which means you may have to contend with flat tires even on your wheelchair. Due to this, pneumatic chair tires are quite difficult to maintain. A pneumatic tire has an outer tire shell as well as an inner tire tube where the air is pumped. Even though you can fix the inner tube when it gets punctured, you may eventually need to get it changed if your tire gets punctured too often.
2. Airless Wheelchair Tires: These types of tires for wheelchairs are not filled with air but are filled with materials such as foam, rubber, and plastic. These tires do not give as smooth a ride as pneumatic tires but they score where durability is concerned as there is no worry about flat tires because they do not have any air. Airless tires generally fall into three categories:
   • Semi-pneumatic wheelchair tires.
   • Foam tires
   • Solid rubber or plastic wheelchair tires.