My nice wooden office chair is nearly five years old and something has gone wrong. It has a seat angle/leaning resistance adjustment, but the seat has picked up a slight forward tilt that cannot be corrected. I'm going to have to flip it over and see what can be done.
Short term, I can move the flat and lock washers on the bolts holding the front of the seat to the metal tilt and swivel gadget to between the seat and that part. Long-term, I hate to replace it, but I will if I have to.
The "skate wheel" casters I put on it have proven their worth. Larger and a little more resilient than a standard office-chair wheel, they have resisted getting jammed-up with cat hair and roll well. My other office-type chair, a more typical metal one with a padded seat and back at the desk/dressing table in my bedroom has the same kind of casters, which work as well on the rug in that room as they do on the chair mat in the office.
Update: It's a broken weld, one that holds the collar for the top of the adjustable pneumatic vertical support to the metal cradle that does the leaning pivot. The support's a force-fit into the collar, so this is chair-ending damage.
Having read of your exploits for a little time, now, I refuse to believe that you cannot pull out the old arc welder and fix that thing. I am sorry about your chair.
ReplyDeleteI might have been able to, except my employer's nice wire-feed welder was mysteriously lost several years ago, under circumstances my department was expressly invited to ignore.
ReplyDeleteNot having a welder of my own, I decided to invest in the cheapest model of the same chair. It's the "antique white" version, so I will probably just move the seat and truck to the new metal parts.
I may see how the old hardware comes apart, and look into having it welded. This is often relatively inexpensive -- I had an MGB gas tank patched at a welding shop quite some time back. Those get brazed, and apparently the methods used to do that while not enjoying a gasoline-fume explosion can be quite interesting. Alas, they won't let you watch.
A nice little welder isn't enormously expensive. The skill to make a good weld, though, that carries a larger price.
30 seconds with my TIG welder would put it right.
ReplyDeleteHad the same problem on my high-end office chair after fifteen years of good service. Attempted a re-weld on two different occasions but both failed miserably. Broke at same place again and forward-back alignment was still off, as mating edges of the break were not positioned correctly. End result was replacing with another chair.
ReplyDeleteBezos mart offers the underchair hardware as a replacement, or did until recently.