Feet Pics

So a while back I bought this chair from Ikea. This was not a great decision, for multiple reasons.

One of those reasons is that the casters keep falling out of the legs.

Which is really not helpful for the whole "staying upright" thing that chairs are supposed to do. They're supposed to be held in place by these rather stubby plastic inserts that are "press fit" (more like loosely held) into the ends of the legs, but now they're going to get a little chemical assistance.

The putty is supposed to mix up black, but I guess dark grey is close enough.

It was a little frustrating to work with as it was a touch crumbly rather than being smooth and easily malleable like I hoped it would be.

But thankfully I did manage to squish a reasonable amount in there between the plastic inserts and the inside of the legs.

I was a little bit worried that the epoxy wouldn't have much holding power, given how dry it felt, but I think my worries might have been misplaced.

It definitely stuck just fine to the cardboard it was resting against overnight.

Anyway, the chair is back together and everything's good, right?

Wrong. These casters are awful, as in pure 100% garbage. Ikea decided to be a little too clever for their own good and designed them with a spring-loaded mechanism where they won't roll unless you apply a fairly significant amount of downward pressure. So any time you try to move the chair around, it just scrapes across the ground instead of rolling. And then when you're sitting down, the chair is all rolly and unstable under you. Literally the worst of both worlds.

And added on top of that, the global standard for every single office chair caster ever made is to have an 11mm shank. Guess what Ikea's are? Yeah, that's right, 10mm. They just had to be different for the sake of being different.

Thankfully, you can find Ikea-specific replacements, and I found these bell glides listed for sale on the House of Bezos.

Basically they're a solid foot that replaces the wheeled casters. they slide relatively easily when you're not sitting on them, and then stay solidly in place when you do sit down. You know, the right way around.

They generally come in two heights: a low-profile height, which is basically just no taller then they need to be; and then these high-profile versions which are designed to match the height of wheeled casters. I chose the latter because the lift cylinder in the middle of the leg assembly hangs down pretty far, and I didn't want it to end up scraping the floor.

They install very easily: just yank out the casters and shove in the bell glides.

That's much better.

Of course, there is still one teensy tiny little design flaw with this chair.

Somehow Ikea thought it would be an amazing idea to design the seat to tilt forward at a noticeable angle. I can't even begin to imagine why they thought this would be a good idea, but it makes the chair remarkably uncomfortable to sit in.

But this is a problem to fix another day. For now,  I'm done with dealing with this awful, awful chair.