An office chair “doesn’t move” and ruins the carpet? Replace the rollers with legs

Office chairs are designed to work on hard floors (wooden boards, parquet, laminate). But they are often used today at home at the desk. And here the advantage - the rollers, which allow you to easily move in a chair on a hard surface, turn into a disadvantage if there is a carpet underneath, and even with a thick and high pile.
Moving on the carpet becomes almost impossible without damage to the pile and additional force. If the chair remains in one place for a long time, the pile under the rollers becomes wrinkled and unpleasant “bald patches” form. But the chair can be eliminated from these shortcomings without much expense, time and labor.

Will need

The idea is to replace the rollers, which have a small surface contact area and therefore cannot move on soft carpet, with supports with a larger area.
In order to carry out the upcoming work, we need to prepare:

• round wooden legs for furniture;
  
• Phillips head screws;
  
• a can of black spray paint;
  
• sliders;
  
• adhesive strips of the ZM Command fastening system.

Tools you will need: pliers, a Phillips screwdriver and a drill with a 6mm drill bit.

The process of replacing rollers with legs

We will replace the rollers with wooden legs, which represent the central part of the sphere with the top and bottom cut off. A bushing with hooks and threads is pressed into the hole in the middle. We remove the mounting screws as they are not needed for our business. We replace them with screws for a Phillips screwdriver.


We cover the surface of the legs with black paint from an aerosol can without unscrewing the screws from the holes to protect the threads in them from the paint and make the process easier. We apply the paint several times, as it is intensively absorbed into the wood, which has a porous structure. We also carefully apply paint to the head of the screws. This will make them invisible after installing the legs on the crosspiece of the chair.
We disconnect the cross from the chair or simply turn it over and remove all the rollers and unscrew two small screws from the decorative trims.

At the ends of the beams of the cross, we drill through holes with a diameter of 6 mm using a drill and a drill bit. To prevent the decorative overlays from cracking, cover them with tape or other sticky material while drilling.


After waiting for the paint on the legs to dry, unscrew the fastening screws and place the legs under the beams of the cross, aligning the holes. We insert screws into the holes of the beams from above and screw them into the threads of the legs.

To improve the sliding of the legs over the pile of a carpet or other soft surface, we apply sliders to the lower part. They can be secured with epoxy glue, but it is better to do this using two adhesive strips of the ZM Command fastening system. This option will allow you to easily replace them with new ones as the sliders wear out.




By installing the crosspiece in place, or by turning the chair over, we can make sure that with the new supports it moves well over the carpet, without “burrowing” into the pile, and leaves almost no dents, since the area of ​​the legs’ supports is much larger than that of the rollers .


Original article in English