Glider
"In het verleden behaalde resultaten bieden geen garanties voor de toekomst"
About this blog

These are the ramblings of Matthijs Kooijman, concerning the software he hacks on, hobbies he has and occasionally his personal life.

Most content on this site is licensed under the WTFPL, version 2 (details).

Questions? Praise? Blame? Feel free to contact me.

My old blog (pre-2006) is also still available.

See also my Mastodon page.

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/ Blog / DIY
Putting my office chair on legs

For a while, I've been annoyed by the height of my desk. It is slightly higher than ergonomical, which causes my shoulders to be always raised when I'm working behind my computer.

Since sawing off a bit from the feet of my desk was a bit too irreversible for me (and it's hard to figure out how much to cut off exactly), I looked for a way to raise my office chair a bit further than its normal adaptable range. I couldn't find a way to get the central pillar loose from the base (even though the pillar looks threaded, it wouldn't turn), so I looked for a way to extend the wheels a bit.

The wheels are fixed into the base of the chair using a pin in the wheel that clamps into a socket in the base of the chair ("klemstift").

Chair wheels

I was hoping to find a part that has a pin at the top, and a matching socket at the bottom, which I could use to extend the length of the pins of my wheels a bit. It seems these things don't actually exist, at least I couldn't find any online.

Looking at the wheels more closely showed me that the pin wasn't actually fixed in the wheel, but it was actually a two-side pin that also clamped into the wheel.

This opened up the option of replacing the pin with one that has one threaded end, which can receive a "coupler nut" (not sure how these things are really called connecting to another identical pin, which can be inserted into the chair base again). These parts should be available from a proper hardware store for less money than the webshops I linked, by the way.

Chair wheels

The end result is that I now have a chair that is around 5cm higher than before. It looks a bit weird and a bit fragile, but it actually feels more robust than it looks.

My legs are now pushed against the bottom of my desktop, so this is as high as it gets. For the perfect ergonomical position, I should be even higher, but that seems impossible unless I find a desk with negative thickness (I suspect this is because my arm length to torso length is a bit non-standard due to my above-avarage body length). Even so, I can already feel that this handful of centimeters greatly helps to improve my posture and removes a ton of strain from my shoulders. Yay!

Chair wheels

 
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