An exploration of a technique through usage of a chair

Materials Maple Paperback Venner, Mild Cold Steel Tubing, Rubber

L15 inches X W14 inches X H25.5 inches

April 16- May 2018

In this project I wanted to take what learned and put it to a more practical use.  So to that end I chose the chair as the form as it had a lot of ground rules that I had to play along.

This chair is not really meant for certain people.  I find this chair to be quite uncomfortable.  Yet several of my peers found this chair to be comfortable.  It has to do with something with how the convex meets the leg but for me it hits on a weird muscle in my leg that makes it not seat able.

The original concept of this chair was to be like an ugly duckling and the ugly was suppose to be the wrinkles on the surface of the chair, but I wasn't able to do that due to the limited time as well as problems working with the Vacuum bag.

So it ended up being a chair with a modern look.  It that can be described as uncomfortable but also comfortable if you are under a certain height (I guess not sure but those that did like it were smaller than me and I am not that particularly tall either).  It has this certain elegance to it that makes it feel right at home until you sit on it where it decides for you whether it is the right fit or not.  Maybe this should be called the sorting chair or something similar to the sorting hat in Harry Potter (a curious thought).  

It was a really fun process for me to really take what I learn and put it into something more definable and there are loads of things that I did not think about that was discovered through the critique such as an adjustable seat height using this technique.

On a side note this chair had sprung back and so much of the uncomfortable was lost.  Though I will say it is still uncomfortable to me but it was much worse before.  Most of the spring back is thanks to the fact that this chair had only half of it being glued together for some reason that is lost to me completely.

Reflection:

I have been using this chair for a while now and I can say it is a pretty nice meditation chair.  The slight discomfort allows me to get into a head space that I usually struggle to get into with other meditation chairs.  Mainly because of the ergonomics and the cushions that modern day meditation chairs often provide that end up making me sleep than actually meditate.  The back of the chair actually helps me locate where I am in space and allows me to re position myself so that I do not have a terrible posture.  In some sense this chair can make you sit more properly.  I would recommend this type of chair for those who wish to sit in a more harder type of chair to meditate with.  Also makes a great gaming chair as I am forced to always be on edge as the discomfort is always so close at hand.

Using an angle grinder I carved out the holes in the mold

Altogether there were 3 revisions to the mold but in this picture this was the 2nd revision the first one was way too shallow.

I could have gone with a rib mold, instead of a solid mold of poplar.  I wanted to play it safe since I felt uncertain about the Vacuum Bag not being able to perform.  So I created this mold so that I would have part of a 2 part mold.

In my earlier attempts with the Vacuum Bag (via Singular Modular Piece) this method would have been unfeasible due to the size of the project.  However as this was a chair there was a good chance for this project to work with a vacuum bag.

Still the problem remains of getting the wood to go into the pockets.  There were a couple of options but I chose to make a lid that would compresses the laminated wood or chipboard in this case to the holes using foam.  While I could have drilled holes into the mold many of my peers have mentioned that that method does not seem to work in our shop. 

a .25 inch laminated chipboard that was just pressed by the Vacuum bag.  As you can see in the chipboard there were some deformities within the 2nd revision of the mold that needed to be worked out.

This problem persists!  I could not get the weird bends that was happening at the short end of the bend.

While I manage to lessen the bend by elongating the curves and so forth the bends exist

The problem (the wood would bent inward at the moment of bending it to form the seat of the chair) persisted  and at this point I had made a 3rd modification to the mold.  After some discussions I went about to make 2nd part mold but not really as this was meant to help create an even pressure on the moment of the bend to prevent the weird inward bend from happening.

I also tried to prebend the wood to see if it would help in the cause.

Vacuum Bag with the new 2 part mold

This mold was done by hand and a mock up of what it can be like

This was the first test with the mold and as you can see compared to the hand made one it is incredibly flat

Testing weird positions that it could take

You could actually sit on this chair without welds so it was a great help to learning what I can do and feel for the chair

So in my last attempt I managed to get the curve I wanted, but for some reason only half of the lamination was glued and so I was stuck in this dilemna of trying to fix it

I put it in the bag (the glue fell out) I put epoxy the glue popped open and wood pulp just didn't hold as there wasn't enough surface to bond to due to half of it being not glued

This was the model used to make the frame the lines represented where to cut off and put together the pieces when making the frame.

The metal bends took 13 hours to make with 2 hours of grinding and 1 hour of welding pretty short, but at the same time because I did it in one day and for some obscure reason of using a 1/8 inch wall thickness I got bruises on my forearm due to the intensity and strain it put on me.

Filing off the welds extra

Welding is pretty easy once you get the flow of things

Primer the coat for spray paint I would eventually use this as my final coat due to not liking the paint I choose.

Drilling the holes for the rubber mounts

The paint color was not as good as I thought and went back to the primer.  Although for some reason the paint kept slipping off despite it not getting on my hands

Either from too much paint or not enough drying time.