We value office chairs because of their comfort and healthy posture and the money we spend on them, even though they develop issues as time progresses. However, issues such as a sinking office chair don’t necessarily make an office chair bad. When an office chair sinks, the cylinder of the office chair may have lost its lift.
If so, you may have to replace your office chair gas cylinder so it can function well again. But before a replacement, you should know how to disassemble an office chair gas cylinder. Do you have a chair that sinks at work all day? Or do you find it challenging to make height adjustments on your chair?
Here are the steps on how to disassemble office chair gas cylinder:
- Place the Chair on a High Surface
- Place An Underlayment on the Surface
- Position the Needed Tools Close
- Change The Direction or Position of the Chair
- Detach Gas Cylinder From the Seat
- Remove the Cylinder From Base
In this article, you will learn how to disassemble an office chair’s gas cylinder using the following tools: a cordless drill, Rubber mallet, Hammer, Torque wrench, and Gas Cylinder.
Six Steps to Disassembling Office Chair Gas Cylinder
With all the help an office chair gas cylinder offers, the question is, why will anyone want to disassemble his chair’s gas cylinder? Well, maybe after a long time of using your chair, you walk into your office to sit one day. Then your chair sinks to the bottom as you sit so that your elbows are no longer level with the desk.
Instead of buying a new chair, which will cost you plenty of money, you could choose to replace your gas cylinder. And your office chair will look like a new one again. In this light, if your office chair is sinking or stiff, the steps below can help you disassemble it so you can replace the cylinder.
1. Place the Chair On A High Surface
Some people prefer disassembling their gas cylinders on the floor for whatever reason that is best known to them. Yet, even though they choose to do that, there’s a much better way. There’s no denying that office chair disassembling doesn’t take a long time, but we can’t be sure that everyone can overbend so low for even a few minutes.
Some people have health challenges that do not permit them to stay long in discomforting conditions. So it’ll not be fair to assume everyone is alright with squatting or bending so low. If you plan on disassembling your gas cylinder on the floor, you will have to over end yourself or go down to your knees.
It is necessary to consider your posture while working because it also contributes to the success of what you’re doing. While working on the chair, your posture gives you confidence that you can do it. You might doubt yourself if your hands, legs, or entire body is shaking due to an unhealthy posture.
When you squat, knee or overbend for quite some time, your body is likely to shake because it is not familiar with those postures. What would have taken a few minutes would become an unbearable task as you will keep switching positions because of the discomfort of kneeling or bending
However, you can place the chair on a higher surface; it can be your office desk or anything higher than the floor. Similarly, you can get a small seat and sit on it. The preferred posture for dealing with a situation like this is standing; you have better control of yourself when you stand. So, placing the chair on a little bit high surface allows you to stand.
That way, you will have better control over the situation, which will take you less time than you had imagined.
2. Place An Underlayment On the Surface
You wouldn’t want your chair skidding while you’re working on it, nor would you want the grease to spill on your workspace. Therefore, provide an underlayment for your chair so that whatever spills from it drops on the underlayment, not your desk or floor.
The underlayment should give the chair a firmer grip or tact than on an ordinary plain surface. That underlayment is as necessary as the removal tools unless you don’t care about the looks of your office.
You can lay down a towel, blanket, or anything that prevents sliding—the better the underlayment, the better the tact, and the faster the process.
3. Position the Needed Tools Close
Here’s another important thing that you have to do. Ensure all the needed tools are available together. You may be stranded or distracted when you can’t find one of your working tools; it happens to engineers working on engines, and disassembling a gas cylinder is no exception.
So, to be on the safer side, placing your working tools close to you is of great importance. Don’t begin to walk helter-skelter in your office in the name of locating a tool. That’s why engineers have toolboxes in the first place.
But a minor job like this may not require a whole toolbox, just a few selected tools, and you can operate them. Put the tools on an empty side of the underlayment you had cast to put the chair on it. That way, they’ll be visible and accessible.
If you intend to replace the gas cylinder, you can place the new gas cylinder you must have bought. But if that’s not so, and you only want to disassemble the gas cylinder, you may bring in a new one to replace it. You can carry on the remaining steps.
4. Change The Direction or Position Of The Chair
The position of your chair greatly matters when disassembling an office chair. Disassembling might be difficult or not, depending on how you position the chair. Nevertheless, you can put the chair in whatever position is convenient for you, so you don’t have to sweat over a 30-minute job.
Of course, an office chair disassembling shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes if you place the chair in the right direction. Regardless, it is better to lay the chair horizontally, lying on its side. This way, you can clearly see what you’re working on.
The chair reveals its base, which is connected to the chair using nuts and bolts or other fasteners such as clamps or clips.
5. Detach Gas Cylinder From the Seat
After the preparation, removing the gas cylinder from the seat is the next step that seems more real to what you’re up against. Don’t get too excited yet, because you must carefully remove the base, or else you may incur an injury.
If you are not too careful, you might incur expenses from adding more damage to the chair. You can locate an office chair cylinder between the seat and its base. It is the gas cylinder that connects the base and the cylinder.
Aside from connecting the base to the seat, the cylinder enables the adjusting of the office chair up and down. The gas cylinder has Nitrogen gas contained in it such that the Nitrogen gas switches chambers inside the cylinder when you pick or drop the chair lever.
When the Nitrogen gas switches chambers, it allows the chair to shift up and down. Removing the gas cylinder needs extra caution because the chair’s base and seat attach firmly to the cylinder. There are designed cylinder removal tools to help detach the cylinder from the seat.
In times like this, the shaft collar removal tool comes handy. The Office Oasis produces shaft collars to pry away the gas cylinder from the office chair top. Yet, others stick to the common way of loosening the surface cover and pulling out the cylinder from the seat. Well, this is exactly what we will be performing.
Below are some steps you need to detach the cylinder from the seat.
Uncover Protecting Surfaces
There are protecting surfaces that cover the base of the seat. The underside of the seat is tightened with retaining clips or nuts and bolts. If you do not uncover the protecting surfaces, you may not get anywhere close to the gas cylinder even though it is in the center.
Therefore to move any further, you must uncover the bottom cover by removing the clips and unscrewing the bolts and nuts using a wrench or cordless drill. Use a flathead screwdriver or plier to open the clip partially, then slip it out of the piston. Hence, extract the washer at the base top around the piston. It’ll pull off easily.
Pull Out The Base
Now, carefully draw out the base neatly. You can do so by pulling and turning the base counterclockwise at the same time. When you do that, the base will pull out together with the gas cylinder. However, the gas cylinder remains stuck in the base of the chair.
You’ll be left with a step to be over with chair disassembling, which is to remove the cylinder from the base of the chair.
6. Remove the Cylinder From Base
This step draws you closer to removing the gas cylinder completely, but you must consider certain instructions. These instructions, as linear as they may seem, are very important; they include the following:
Remove Office Chair Wheels From The Base
Remove the office chair wheels, so they don’t keep flocking around while you work on the base. Most office chairs have wheels that pop into the socket on the five-arm stand. So all you pull them out by force.
To remove office chair wheels, you must take into account the following:
Flip The Chair Base
If the chair’s base is not upside down yet, make sure you turn it if it is in the office where materials are limited. You can use your trash can to support you in removing the gas cylinder. Flip the base over so that the underside is visible and accessible. Well, it looks like how you laid it on its side when the chair was not yet detached.
Here, it would be best if you turned it upside down. If you can get a container such as an office waste bin, don’t hesitate to put in and invert it. The aim of flipping the base is to get access to the central part of the base, where the cylinder sticks.
Use A Rubber Mallet or Hammer.
One of the best ways of separating the gas cylinder from the base is to hit the edges of the cylinder with a hammer. However, be careful not to hit the mechanism. If you do not want metal-to-metal contact, place a piece of wood over the position of the gas cylinder. But this doesn’t sometimes work before the wood breaks.
While you are using a hammer or rubber mallet to hit the cylinder off the mechanism, separating it from the chair base. If the office chair is an old one, you might experience some difficulty trying to remove it with just some simple hit from the hammer or mallet.
If you face such a problem at any point because of how stiff the cylinder is, I recommend you spray a lubricant to lessen the stiffness. In times like this, one of the best lubricants to use is WD-40. You can spray it at the center of the flipped-over base.
Be careful so you don’t spray the lubricant on another surface apart from the major joints you should spray. That said, it shouldn’t take long for the cylinder to fall out of the mechanism in the base of the office chair.
Conclusion
If you use an office chair for quite too long, there’s no way that chair can retain its default settings. Most times, the common problem is the chair’s sinking or difficulty adjusting the chair’s height.
However, you can disassemble the chair within a few minutes to replace the cylinder, which is the case when such things happen. Finally, I hope that this guide has been helpful and that you’ve been able to disassemble your office chair gas cylinder.
