Wednesday 2 May 2012

Centipede chair design

Sketch for centipede chaise longue
Things I'd like to build one day volume 201522...

Although I'm not sure if I'll ever build this, I have had a design for a rather OTT chaise longue in my head for some years now. 

Essentially an excuse to build a more interesting recliner than your average chaise longue.

The basic concept is a jointed segmented chair body, with firm padded segments hinged together with free rotation along one axis allowing up/down hinging. 

This would then be dynamically held in position by some mechanism to apply a curling tension that tends to make the chair coil up if empty.  When sat on, the weight of gravity on the sitter would counter-balance this to provide a slightly sprung effect.

Sketch for centipede chaise longue 
I have not thought through the exact way the tensioning would be applied . It would need to be adjustable to allow for different people's weights. It may also be necessary to have different  tensioning at different points. For example the lower half (seat area) may need to be under less tension that the area where the support for the lumbar region of the back is, etc.

This would need prototyping!!

I would also want some spring in the legs for dampening to provide a more comfortable seating experience.

As for materials - I rather fancy dark reddy-brown, antiqued and polished leather for the pads on the segments, with some sort of dark metal or possibly kevlar legs.  An aluminium/bronze type alloy perhaps?

Maybe one day!

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