Fixing an Office Chair
Where the hell do I put this?
Anyone that knows me knows I’m basically a hop skip and a jump from a clinical hoarding dysfunction – okay it’s probably not that bad, I really only tend to hang onto things I feel might be useful some day. It’s worked out pretty good, because that’s how most of this site came to be.
For some reason, I held onto an office chair that had the wheel broken off of it somehow. Don’t ask why, I probably won’t tell. Anyway, while reaching behind her, probably to do something with our new baby, my wife managed to snap the arm on her cheap Target office chair – unfortunately the arms on most office chairs are an integral part of the structure of the chair, rendering it pretty much useless.
It struck me to make one out of two, and my original plan of attack was simply to unscrew the screws that went into the bottom of the butt-cushion, and swap bases over. That didn’t work because my old chair, being an “executive” model chair had a high back and that obviously meant needed the screws approximately an eighth of an inch further apart.
What I found next was a small “retaining clip” on a shaft at the bottom that appeared to match on both chairs. After gingerly removing it and carefully dismantling the chair, I discovered that they indeed were a match.
I picked the better looking set of bearings (trivial really, considering the ones in mind were destroyed, see photo), put some good old axle grease in there and reassembled my chair on Sabriena’s wheels/base.
The end result, while rough and obviously worn, is a chair that’ll probably last us until we get enough money to buy another one… like any sane person would have by this point.
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