Chair repair!

I've been seeing more of this sort of thing lately. You have a good design, but the product is so poorly made that it just falls apart or has no inherent durability at all.

Case in point: A lounge chair that I received through a friend to repair.

As you can see, the tubing that the chair is made from simply split.

I surmise that this was due to improper spot welding and also the tubing being on the really cheesy side. Who knows WTF it is actually made from.

I figured that the point where the tubing split was a stress fracture, so I should figure out a way to spread the stress at that point over a larger area to prevent it from cracking again. How? The simplest way is to use a tube that matches the inner or outer diameter of the broken tube and then weld everything together. In some cases, you can even use epoxy.

I found some spare tubing I had leftover from another project that matched the original OD (outside Diameter), and made two cuts in the tube in order to crush it down to the ID (inside diameter) of the original tube:

I got it squished down and hammered into the tube like so:

Then I simply fitted the original tube together:

Then it was time to fire up the welder and lay these down:

Hit it with some self-etching primer:

 I prefer the stuff by Duplicolor. It's really good stuff and works very well in less than ideal conditions. 

Then top it off with some actual paint:

The hardest part of the job was to lace the seat back into place:

 Simple job with the right know-how. It's a darn comfy chair. It has a really interesting folding mechanism, though I think it is a bit overcomplicated for the sake of being fancy. It's just not made at all well. I bet it wasn't even cheap, either, since I got paid a good chunk to fix it, and my price wasn't even questioned. *shrugs* If stuff keeps breaking, I'll keep fixing it. Good for me, I guess. LOL!