Category: Home Ec

So Kohl’s sent Mary a killer deal coupon and we bought some odds and ends, including a new cutting board to replace the decades-old one that I’ve been flycutting clean every few years. Evidently bamboo is the new Right Stuff for cutting boards; it’s certainly eyeshattering.

The thing spent the last few days soaking up a slathering of canola oil, in the hope it won’t soak up other juices.

The instructions say to store the board standing on end so it dries properly. Evidently you’re supposed to hang it from the ring screwed into one end, but a corresponding hook (not supplied) just doesn’t doesn’t have a place on our counter / cabinet / backsplash. However, we could stand it up, leaning against an under-cabinet shelf next to the toaster oven, if only it wouldn’t slide away.

This calls for some aftermarket tweakage!

So I hauled it to the Basement Laboratory Woodworking Wing and installed a pair of silicone rubber feet in little recesses.

I grabbed a 7/16-inch end-cutting end mill in the drill press, because even the manual mill doesn’t have enough height for the board on end and the drill press doesn’t have enough reach for a Forstner bit without fiddling around with the emergency drop stopper clamp. The drill press does have a good vise and an XY table, so I got it pretty close to dead center on the third dark stripe from each edge.

The feet are about 1/4 inch tall: I went down half that in the hopes they wouldn’t bump off quite so easily.

But that didn’t quite work: the adhesive on the feet doesn’t grip the rather porous endgrain bamboo nearly well enough: a foot popped off after a day. I added a layer of Genuine 3M double-stick foam tape to the feet and that’s holding just fine.

Most office desk chairs are crap. Spend a couple of hours in a typical office chair and you wonder if it had been designed by aliens who, perhaps, read the specs for human beings, but never actually met a person in the flesh.

Conversely, you can drive for a couple of hours and get out of the car feeling at least OK. (Well, if you buy a decent car, that is. Last rental car I drove had terrible seats.)

Anyway, you can buy an office chair made from a car seat, but they seem staggeringly expensive for what you get.

So, a couple of decades ago, I went to a junkyard and picked up a nice seat from a fancy wreck for about $50, built a plywood base with six casters from Home Depot, put a 1-foot-diameter Lazy Susan bearing between the two, and bolted everything together. The seat even had power adjustments, so (just for fun) I tucked a battery underneath.

After a while, I stripped off the seat belt doodads… and, of course, you really don’t need power adjustments after the first week.

Worked like a champ for about a decade, but even a high-end seat cushion eventually goes flat. So I swapped in a front seat salvaged from one of our cars (a Toyota Camry wagon, from back before minivans ruled the road) and that lasted another decade. It finally went flat and I swapped in the other front seat.

The 2×6-inch upright boards have slopes and cutouts that match the peculiar shape of the seat frame, with holes drilled in the wood for the metric machine bolts, and that’s a good enough anchorage for an office environment.

The Lazy Susan bearing is between the top plywood layer and the square corner sticking out to the front. That layer bolts to the bottom sheet, providing enough clearance for the various heads and whatnot.

You really need six casters on a fairly large base, because the chair is immensely heavy (it was, after all, designed to not fall apart during a full-on collision) and rather top-and-back-heavy without you in place.

Considerations:

• Get the seat close to the right height, as the adjustment range isn’t all that wide
• Put your center of gravity in the middle of the base. Fortunately, the seat has plenty of forward-aft adjustment
• Get the seat base pretty much horizontal

A closer look at the front:

The back isn’t a lot different:

Maybe I just have a weird butt or don’t spend enough money on office chairs.