For reasons not relevant here, we have a power lift chair which has been shedding upholstery tufts since the day we got it. After realizing this wasn’t going to stop on its own, I spent a while poking around underneath and discovered the steel struts supporting the leg rest rub along the upholstery during their entire travel:
Apparently, the padding behind the upholstery pushes it a bit further out than the original design could accommodate, letting the raw edges on the steel struts shave off the fuzz.
I put relatively smooth stainless steel tape on all the protrusions and bent it around the rough edges:
Those steel folds are smoother than they appear.
It’s not obvious this will solve the problem, but the struts seems to be scraping off much less fuzz than before, so it’s a step in the right direction.
Why is it all of today’s consumer products require 10% more engineering to work in the real world?
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Why did you shield the strut rather than the upholstery?
The struts press firmly against the fabric, so anything atop the fuzz would scrape even harder against the struts and their pivots. Instead, I wanted to shoot flathead screws through the fabric to pull it away from the struts, but there’s no backing board under there, just foam (?) padding between two fabric (?) sheets over the chair’s open steel frame.
The stainless steel tape seemed to be the least-worst alternative: thin, covers all the sharp edges, doesn’t require further stiffening.
It’s not a cheap chair, either, making this mess more annoying than maybe it should be.
I do like the posts that start with “For reasons not relevant here…”
It gives some mystery to the blog. The notion that someone with a lot of private information on a public blog is still hiding the more interesting details.
Can there be anything classier to start a spy movie with than “My name is Bond, James Bond”? Well, yes of course: “For reasons not relevant here, my middle name is Edward.”
I am still waiting for a post that starts with “For reasons not relevant here, I found myself chained to the bed of a Russian actress” – but the rest of the post will of course be about wiring faults in all of the room’s outlets.
Well played, sir!
Should the polypropylene webbing & buckles appear, I promise the reasons won’t be relevant … [grin]