Old leather SAAB seat makes for a pretty comfy chair.

    I used to have a SAAB 900SE, which I lost in a car crash. It was the Special Edition meaning that it had all the bells and whistles, including the black leather interior, which I kept in the hopes of either selling or using in the future.

    Some years later I found myself sitting on the most uncomfortable, raggedy wooden chair ever and decided that it's about time I do something with those SAAB seats. 

    So I found some material to make a simple and quick frame to hold the seat up at a good height. To find out what height it needed to be I just measured the wooden chair I was using before. The material I found was a 2m piece of 30x50mm pine lumber that I had left over from my shelf build.

    I cut the liece of lumber into six pieces, two 40cm long and four 30 long. Then screwed them together into "U" shapes. These made the legs of my chair. I then needed to tie the two "U" pieces together but didn't have any more of that pine lumber, so I scrambled around and came up with a piece of pallet wood. I cut two 45cm pieces from the piece of pallet wood and tied the two "U" shaped pieces together, making a very rough and simple leg frame for my car seat. 

    I then drilled four holes in the frame and attached the frame to my seat with three M8 carriage bolts. I would have used all four but as it turns out the fourth bolt in the SAAB seat is slightly further back and didn't fit with my wooden frame. This was no big deal because the seat is plenty well secured with only three bolts.

    So now that my car seat had legs I could take a seat (heh) and see how it feels. First thing I noticed is that it's slightly too high. Second was that it's hard to move. The seat is heavy and without any wheels it's awkward to move it around. I want to use it as a desk chair so it's important for me to be able to move it around easily.

    So to get two birds with one stone I decided to add wheels and to shorten the legs. The legs had to be shortened to fit the wheels anyways so I just trimmed a centimeter or two more to adjust the height. I then went to the hardware store and got four cheap caster wheels that were just big enough to be screwed on the end of the leg and attached them with woodscrews.

    It's terribly ugly but it works and the seat feels so much better than my old wooden chair. It wasn't my objective to make it look good, rather to make it quickly because my butt was too sore from that old wooden chair. I also kept the slide rail and I'm glad I did because it allows me to adjust the balance of the chair, especially if I want to recline it to lean back.

    Actually I might be lying about not wanting to make it look good. I wanted to turn this seat into a chair for the longest time but couldn't bring myself to do so because I never had the time to make it nice. I wanted to weld together a sturdy steel frame with quality caster wheels, I also wanted the seat to swivel like a captains chair AND the height to be adjustable. So you can see why I never got around to making it. And so the seat sat around collecting dust. But now that I've built it, I don't mind the ugly frame. I can use this chair as-is until I find the time to make it nicer, until then this is good enough. A new frame would only be an improvement from a visual perspective. Functionally it would be almost exactly the same.

    The SAAB seat makes for a pretty comfy chair. I've heard rumors that SAAB seats are so good that people swap SAAB seats into other cars. I think I might have even seen one of these cars but I can't quite remember. One thing's for ceratin - this chair blows the socks off the old wooden chair I was sitting on before.

    Anyways, that's it for now. Thanks for visiting my blog.