How to modify an office chair seat

This was a 3 hour project, where I modified a gaming chair into a flatter seat for home office use.

What I hope you will learn from this video is that the mysteries of chair construction and upholstery don’t remain mysterious once you just dive in and take off the coverings.

This sort of project only requires very basic hand tools – I used a screwdriver, pliers, scissors, hacksaw, and some water pipe. (And a cheap angle grinder but the hacksaw would have worked)

And what you learn here can be applied to other sorts of upholstery like reshaping and recovering a motorcycle seat. Or car seats.

Deconstructing a microwave

Finding microwave ovens on the side of the road is easy.

But what can you find inside one?

There’s all sorts of wiring, micro switches, motors, and magnets. The door has a sheet of glass, and some cool punched metal sheet. And there’s the always useful sheet metal of the body.

I’m planning to build a spot welder from the transformers out of a couple of microwave ovens — they’re configured for high voltage, but I’ll reconfigure them for low voltage, high amperes.

Finished the welding course.

Tonight I solidified the fact that MIG is worth doing.

I created a bunch of junk sculptural items, plus several welds of which I am rightly proud.

This was a basic welding course held by Sydney TAFE, Ultimo. I’d highly recommend it.

I last had my own welding gear decades ago, so it’s been a nice reintroduction for me. I used to have oxy-acetylene equipment, and this has all been electric – Stick, MIG, and TIG.

YouTube

I launched a YouTube channel : Weekend Workshop

Of course (as per usual), I had thought about doing it for some years, then spent months researching and thinking, then one day (not as per usual) I just thought “do it”.
I must have simply run out of excuses – run out of energy thinking about what could go wrong, run out of hearing the same voice in my head saying that it would be a waste of time and energy.

So I did it.

I’m not by nature a publisher. I’m more of a consumer. But I realised that I do have some stories to share. And maybe some help to offer other people. I plan to start simple. To explore and learn the tools and techniques of the YouTube world. To put stuff online without worrying what the end goal is, or what the end result will be.

The idea is simple – to record what I do on the weekends.

A couple of years ago, my brother Jeff challenged me to buy a cheap old motorcycle and build something for the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride. So I did it. And it turned out to be a lot of work (and a lot of fun) and involved finding a workshop space. And spending every weekend working there, to get the motorbike running and registered with 2 days to spare!

Of course I didn’t take video of the whole custom-motorcycle journey, but I did take lots of photos, and I’ll share them here at some stage.

But at the end of that project, I found myself at a loose end – I had plenty of free weekends, I had a workshop, and I had stories to tell.

Welcome to the Weekend Workshop.

Carbs and Plumbing pipe

I’d been riding the bike for a year with whatever pod filters were on the bike when I bought it. They fell apart, and I lost one while the bike was off the road.

So I bought some new ones on eBay (of course). When they arrived, they were too small. Cheap, but one size too small. And they had a 45 degree bend, so they would bump into the frame anyway. I tossed them in the back of a drawer.

When I got the bike running again, it started OK, but under any load the engine stalled.

My immediate reaction was that the carbies needed cleaning. I poked about with fine copper strands. And I attacked everything with petrol and brushes. I did unearth a whole bunch of gunk.

When that didn’t make any difference to the stalling, I took the carbies to a local bike shop where they “officially” cleaned them. No difference.

In a last-ditch flurry of inspiration, I wondered if the “too small” filters could be attached in some way.

I toured the plumbing section of the local Bunnings warehouse, and came home with a couple of these :

reducer

Not exactly this, but close. Little plumbing pieces that join different size pipes.

As it turns out, it reduced EXACTLY from the small pod air cleaners to the manifold.

And what’s more, as soon as I fitted them, the carbies started behaving – and I could ride the bike without stalling.

Sheer magic.

The pipe seems to calm the turbulent airflow (which is the downside of CV carbies like these Mikuni BS 30 SS) and the 45 degree bend allows the filters to clear the frame.

Despite claims to the contrary, the GSX250 does NOT need the original still-air filter box to calm the airflow – these plumbing fixtures do the job.