Making a reclining chair, part 2! Now with padding!

With some plans drafted for the chair sides, we're going to finish the chair. The goal I envisioned is to allow the chair to be dismantled if needed, so I'll be making some weird components. I opted to make some notches in the chair sides to fit the crossmember in the reclining mechanism as a means of holding it together.

Using the lamination techniques outlined a while back, I made some large boards 2 cards wide, one card tall and 4 cards thick using some excess X-Men TCG cards as middle filler (need to whittle down that stack) and a Magic outer covering. These will hide the joining mechanisms. Next bit of action is to make the posts for the armrests. I'll be making these in beam sections to be joined by biscuits and slots, rather than cut out large sections.


Each section is approximately 5mm thick, composed of 4 layers of 4-card thick sections. The inner section has notches cut into it before gluing. The alternative would be to cut the notches along the face, then peel the layers away. The former method allows better control over notch width and depth, as I can measure now and I know the thickness of 4 Magic cards.

There will be three parts to the armrest assembly: the front support, the back support, and the main armrest. After gluing the laminations together, they were sanded flush.

Biscuits and larger support elements were added to the members to allow better control of position when assembled. A similar method was done with the chair back.

With all the parts assembled, the chair is semi-completed. Just needs cushions. The project used up a good deal of cards, which can be seen by the dwindling stack of cards under my monitor. Both stacks used to be the same height.

To make the cushions, I wanted something spongy. Unfortunately, I didn't get what I wanted, so this crappy white plastic packing material I found at work shall do. I cut out a section roughly the shape I needed for the cushion interior.

With some useless fabric, I created a padded outer cover that would make the plastic less horrible feeling. Next step is to wrap it up in the cushion cloth. Something that looked like khaki was used.

This method is really half-assed. Since I won't be seeing the bottom of the cushion ever, I decided to assemble it by stitching it to the seat filler.

Repeat until you have this horrible looking square. Worst thing I've made in a while.

I repeated this method for the leg rest cushion, but with 4 layers of thick fabric, then sewn that to the larger cushion by means of a simple cloth. The middle cloth serves to prevent debris/legs/children from falling into the gap between the leg rest and the chair body. The straps allow me to secure the cushion to the leg rest assembly without glue, so I can remove it if necessary.

And that's the main cushion for the seat. Now, to go make the back seat cushion... then this project will be completed.

This Month's Project: Reclining Chair Mechanism

This month's project is a reclining chair. Was going to originally make a wingback chair, but that wouldn't have been fun at all. To start the program, I needed a mechanism. A bit of digging, and I found this auto-reclining mechanism on a european supplier site:

Unfortunately, this was the only image I could find that was workable: semi-profile view and a clear view of all the components. It's simple but also a good start. Time to draft schematics!

I started off by attempting to draw the mechanism in workable views to get an idea of how the parts worked. Since I was using Magic cards to build this, I decided to build all struts and members with 3mm wide cards and 1/16" holes to fasten them to each other.

With the preliminary drawings done, I drafted some mockup parts to test out movement.

Leg rest mechanism folded. The initial build didn't fold neatly as I'd like, so I changed one of the angles on the curved arm to better fold the assembly.

Here is the mechanism extended. Worked out fine, except I didn't know what the round disc element did early on. Turns out, that piece allows the back rest to recline further. I learned that this mechanism lets you extend the leg rest by reclining back, without the use of a switch or lever.

With the main mechanism finalized, I proceeded to cut out two sets of parts out of 4-card thick stacks of Magic.

To fasten the parts, I bent paper clips into U shaped staples. To lock the parts, I threaded the paper clips through 1/16" holes drilled with a manual hobby drill, and bent the ends like the ends of a staple.

Paper clips worked well in holding the struts in place, but there's a noticeable lack of support along the axial direction of rotation due to the small area. To rectify this, the two sets of parts will need to be linked with a cross bar to keep the parts centered.

This diagram served to plan out how the parts would overlap. Since there's quite an amount of parts, I needed to sort out how they'd overlap and how they'd be joined to the main frame parts. After some gluing and shimming, we get the following result:

Well, that worked out way better than I hoped. I didn't expect this thing to actually work out at all, structurally with Magic cards. Time to draft schematics for the sides of the chair!

From here, it's all "wing it". I modeled the chair off the actual chair's finished appearance, with the exception that mine's a lot more crappy. And I've also designed zero other reclining chairs ever in my life. Won't stop me from continuing on with this project.

Next time: we make large slabs of cards and sew some cushions!