Fixing A Chair

So I went to use the office chair upstairs. I bought that chair a few years ago when the company I worked for was getting rid of some furniture. It was one of the last to go so I got it for $20. It was made by Haworth back in 1987. It's blue and weighs 4 and a half tons. At least it feels like it.

The chair weighs so much because it is a good solid chair. The fact that I was going to stand on a rolling, tipping chair to change a light bulb is not really the point. Yes, it seems risky. It probably is. But again, that is not the point.

The point is when I looked at the chair, the right arm rest was laying over to the side, someone had broken it. I don't know how they broke it, but they did. The other day, I knew the arm rest was a bit loose, but today it was laying down sideways almost.

To say I was miffed is an understatement. I was ticked off. And really, what bothered me most was not that the arm rest was broken. I was pretty sure it could be fixed, or I would simply throw out a $20 chair that I had used for about 3 years. The chair being broken was not my biggest annoyance.

What really ticked me off was knowing without a doubt that when I asked the kids about the chair, no one, not one would know anything about it. Each will swear they never saw it broken and had no idea how it happened. That is typical of problems like this. Apparently someone sneaks into my house and then breaks random things, leaving without ever being seen.

So I took the chair apart, found that 2 bolts, each 1/4 inch in diameter had sheared off. Whatever happened, it wasn't something light. Due to not paying attention, I had to disassemble and reassemble the chair twice. In the end, I had 3 bolts in my parts box that worked.

So 3 bolts, some sweat, 3 chunks of skin, and 2 hours of using a screwdriver and I had it fixed. And honestly it is better now than it was before.

I looked up the specs on this chair and tried to find an equivalent chair from the manufacturer just for grins to see how much it costs. The current generation equivalent Haworth chair goes for about $600 new, and about $200 used.

I asked the kids who knew anything about it. None did. Of course. Oh well. I guess I need to put up surveillance cameras and catch that guy that sneaks in to my house just to break things.

Copyright 2012, Kevin Farley (a.k.a. sixdrift, a.k.a. neuronstatic)