A tiny bit of progress

Told you all it would be a while. Here's the chair without the back. I finally got it off.

This little bugger was the culprit, it was jammed in the channel with the dowel that holds it in place. I chipped up the bottom of the backrest support bit hammering it up far enough to get the screw out. The channel took a few misses too so it has some choppy-ness that will have to be dealt with.

The backrest support. I've taken the backrest out (would've been smarter to do it before, but I never said I was smart. As you can see it's equally or more rusty than the head rest piece, plus the channel is longer. Uses the same principals as the headrest though for adjustment. Lever pulling back (and down) against a big dowel that is lifted by a spring loaded smaller dowel from underneath. The smaller dowel is pretty lodged in there. I'm going to have to setup a vice (hello Harbor Freight) on the back porch and hammer it out. I'll be able to also setup a wire wheel out there to clean off the parts, I still have to figure how to clean the inside channel that the small dowel moves in though.

 The back of the chair. You can see that the awful pink may have been an attempt to match the original. I'll probably go with plain black.

That's about it for now. I'm also going to do a quick and dirty mod to my 20 year old handmade-from-scrap-wood desk. The wife has come up with some nice nagahide (sp?) to cover the old fiberboard and a friend of hers picked up one of those quasi-fake travel trunks we can steal the brass corner bits off. I was also thinking of lining the surface with some copper channel if I can find some cheap enough. Almost picked up some carpet joiner tack-strips, but they're all textured and I don't think it would look right. I want nice bright (and smooth) brass.

The 1800s Optician Chair - part 2

So, a couple things to add about the chair. I'm hoping to re-upholster the back and seat. Whoever owned it before did a clean job on it, but he re-used pepto-pink has got to go. I am looking for the rest of the head-rest, but have an idea to potentially mount an overhead swing arm which could support my two monitors. You see, I want it to be my computer station. I'm already scribbling drawings of a mounted swing-arm for the keyboard/mouse tray. The openings meant for the optional stand (the non-round portion of the bottom) would be perfect for bringing up some obscured cables The overhead may be too ambitious, we'll see how it goes.

The 1800s Optician Chair

The first actual purchase towards my new aesthetic was an opticians chair we found at a flea market in Springfield, OH. That was about 6 months ago, and I'm just now getting around to start working on it. Unemployment may have contributed to my newfound energy *shrugs*. So here's some pics. As near as we can figure it is an institutional model from the 1800's. It's made (or branded at least) by American Optical Company. It's not very ornate, however there are some chrome bits we've discovered underneath the paint some former owner added. The pneumatics all seem to work pretty well and it doesn't leak, which I understand is somewhat unusal. We thought maybe it was a dental or hairdressers chair until I found the tag under the paint. I scrubbed it with some Scotch-Brite type pads so I could read it.

I'll have to repaint it at some point so it doesn't rust.
We also found that the head rest and back didn't slid up and down as they should. It's taken quite a bit of work and liquid wrench to get the head rest part off and I'm still working on the back.

Interesting mechanism. There's a set-screw in the bottom of the piece, it put's adjustable amounts of pressure on a spring, which sets against a metal dowel. The dowel then pushes with more or less force on a horizontal dowel which lodges the headrest in place. A big lever (which I believe was chrome) pulls the horizontal dowel back down allowing the doctor to adjust the height. Of course, that all assumes that everything isn't coated in rust. Then the spring-loaded dowel, and the horizontal dowel, do not want to budge, causing much sweaty work for me.

I'm presuming the chair back is a similar design, but as it has a much longer track, it is much more difficult to budge. I'm afraid I've chipped the bottom of the part just a little trying to hammer it loose..

First post

Well that was easier than I anticipated...
I wanted to setup a blog as I'm about to embark on slowly (we'll see just how slow) making my office and computers into a more steampunk themed environment. We move a lot and I'm a bit of a lazy slacker so I have done nothing of the sort to date, but consider it often. It's also a bit of "nesting" as we really do mean to stay here in the Columbus, OH area for the forseeable future (despite being recently unemployed)..