Repair an executive leather covered office chair Featured

If you search for "leatherette repair" or "faux leather repair" you will find a lot of info

Often the office chairs sold as leather only have a token leather panel, the top of the seat and/or the front surface of the back and the rest is fake leather or vinyl.

Even the leather may be bonded leather rather than a tanned hide.

You can consult an upholstery or a leather shop, for ideas.

Arm rests, are a Level 37 DIY project. Anybody can wrap gaffer tape around the armrest, and the tape will last for two weeks. You don't get "points" for doing it that way.

Stick on leather ? NO.

Making a permanent repair, where the armrest is not a "thermal bridge", that requires a lot of skills, and access to specialty shops. You can't just take any old upholstery cloth bolt and sew up an armrest, as that will last longer than gaffer tape, but a shorter time than you really had in mind.

You *do not* want to be doing this, over and over again. The chair will end up in the tip, rapidly, if that is how it's going to turn out.

The chair I'm sitting in, has DIY armrests, but they are rated a "fail". One of the replacements started to crack, and I had to reinforce it with aluminium to try and hold the pieces together. Arm rests simply have too many stupid curves and only-close-to-planar surfaces. You need a bloody NC machine to make a good fit.

Think of it this way. If the manufacturer cannot make a good armrest, what chance do you have ???

If you select a "popular" chair, like a Herman Miller Aeron, there are enough "junked chairs" out there, you might be able to find parts. At the startup company I worked at, our furniture was a lot of used Herman Miller from a bank. There were good chairs in the lot. And duff chairs. As a newly hired employee, you were sent back into the storage area, to extract a chair and put it into working order :-) Piece of cake, when you have all those spare parts staring you in the face.

That's the advantage of selecting an "expensive but popular" item, where there are a ton of junkers to use for parts. In my local area, there could have been *thousands* of those in circulation at one time. Getting a hundred of those chairs as a bulk lot from a bank, is just the tip of the iceberg. Since COVID, there would be another "rush" of used furniture in the market. There are lots of workers, still working at home, and they did not necessarily get to take chairs from work, to their home office. One place I visited, all the chairs and the cubicle jungle, are still sitting there. Deserted.

There are even discussions here, to take the office space now sitting idle, and make accommodation for people in it. As there is a (self-generated) housing shortage, and creative ideas are welcome at a time like this. I've seen municipalities make "tiny s*it one room houses" for people, little better than a garden shed. And the people in them ? They're glad to have them! It beats sleeping in the woods.

Rather than fix the armrest, you could look into the used market. For an Aeron, you need a rough idea of size. For example, as a joke at my other work place, people would order an XL chair even if they didn't need one, because they could pretend to be a "big ass boss" in such a chair :-) The original Aeron came in S,M,L,XL while the current day chairs only rate S,M,L and there does not seem to be a fourth size now. As a joke then, if you needed an L, you ordered an XL so your chair would be bigger than the other staff chairs.

Paul

I discovered some youtube videos that describe what i was looking for. I then checked out kits that will/may do the job. They admit it won't last for ever.

I will have to do it in the garden because the spray will go everywhere so I cannot begin until the spring.