As many of you may know I have been working on building a better seat for my coker. The final result is a dual density gel seat that looks like I found it in the garbage but still a good strong gel seat that was extremely cheap.
Here are instructions on creating a beauty such as this.
Ingredients
1 gel keyboard wrist rest (I used a Belkin WaveRest Gel Wrist Rest, Black)
1 KH foam
1 KH handle
1 KH seat cover (a fusion will take away from the ghetto beauty)
1 Viscount seat (I guess this is now called a classic seat)
1 shoelace
4 6mm screws
4 nuts for those bolts
4 lock washers
Tools
Hands, or some sort of super arm attachment for tool grasping, I’m thinking like a robot arm.
Socket wrench
Philips screw driver
Flat head screwdriver (or a spoon they work pretty well)
A variety of good sharp knives (I used 2 custom made high density foam cutting knives, and a Swiss army knife)
A drill press capable of drilling through steal
A 6mm drill bit
An air powered hand grinder (I think that’s what it’s called although I’m sure there are other tools that would do the job)
Something to mark where to drill properly
Directions
Take the bumpers off of the viscount seat
- Unscrew the four screws (two on the back bumper and two on the front)
- Pull the bumpers off (sounds simple doesn’t it!)
Now peel the viscount cover off
- Start with the edges peel then carefully and always hold the cover as close to where the cover is separating from the foam to keep the foam intact.
- Just make sure to be careful and avoid ripping out too much foam from the sides of the seat.
This is where your judgement is going to come in and it will start to get a bit difficult.
- Start to remove the foam out from the middle of the seat. I found using a dremel an easy way of doing this, it takes time and be patient.
- Remove all of the foam from the top of the seat except for a half inch rim around the seat so that it creates a sort of seat shaped bowl. (unicus has a picture of this so we can avoid my dirty webcam pictures in bad light )
Time to attack your KH seat foam
- Using your knife of choice cut the top inch off of the KH seat foam off. When you are done you should be left with what looks like a piece of foam one inch thick and in the shape of a seat.
- This is where more judgement comes in. Place the newly cut seat foam on the base of the viscount so that you can see how much needs to be taken off of the sides.
- Once again using your knife of choice cut the sides of the foam so that it fits nicely into the bowl of the seat that you had made earlier. If you cut it all right then it should now be about the same thickness of the viscount or a bit more thin. If you cut too much off the sides you can use scraps to fill it in (I had to do that as I’m no a pro)
Here is where the Gel comes in
- Take the wrist rest and place it on your seat so that you can judge how much to cut.
- Cut it to the correct length to fit inside the same bowl as the KH foam (even if your KH foam is too thick for the gel to fit inside it)
- Now you should have a big piece of scrap cut that up into pieces that will create an even area for the back of the seat.
- If you place the gel pads on the seat it makes the seat look huge and super thick. It is now time to fix that. If you look at the piece of wrist pad and you look at the cross section of it you will notice that the layer of gel is actually sandwiched between two other types of foam. If you grab a hold of the top piece of foam and the gel in one hand and the bottom foam in the other you can easily peal the bottom part of the foam off of the gel therefore reducing the amount of crap foam.
- Once you have removed the bottom layer of all the pieces of wrist pad you can now put them on top of the KH foam, I found that the gel was sticky enough to actually hold it all together pretty easily (sorry this picture is horrid).
Wooo power tool time (sorry I don’t have any pictures of it the webcam doesn’t reach to the workshop)
- Carefully remove the KH foam and the Gel and set it aside.
- Flip the viscount base upside down and look up by the front you will notice that there are two places where screws go in. There should be foam covering them and underneath them. Remove it. In fact while you are at it you will notice that the foam is more thin where the bumper used to be, remove all the foam that was under the bumper but be careful to follow along the lines so that you don’t remove any foam that will touch your body.
- Once the two pieces of metal that stick out are nice and visible and workable, take your grinder and cut them off carefully so that you don’t damage the seat base.
- Now that they are gone sand around the area so that there are no jagged edges.
- Test fit the KH handle, It will take a bit of pushing to get it to fit properly (at least for me since I didn’t do a great job at removing the foam) but it should still be a perfect fit pretty much.
- Now take your tool to mark the first hole to be drilled. I used a drill bit that is made for this job. I held the KH handle onto the seat and put the drill bit through the screw holes of the KH handle and it then went through the steal making a small hole where I would drill later with the 6mm drill bit.
BE VERY CAREFUL WHEN DRILLING IF YOU MESS UP IT IS A HUGE PAIN TO FIX AND IF YOU MESS UP REALLY BADLY IT CAN RUIN THINGS
- Now drill one hole using your 6-mm drill bit. I would suggest removing the KH seat handle for this part as it will be kind of dangerous around there. Now take a 6mm screw and put it through the base and the handle and put a nut on it to hold it all together. Now you’re pretty safe for fitting the next bolts but not completely clear.
- Use your tool you used earlier and mark where to drill for the corner bolt directly across from the screw you have put in. Now take the base apart again and drill the hole.
- Once again put the screws into the two holes you have now. Now you can go ahead and mark the last two holes, take the handle off again and drill the last two holes.
The hard part is over now.
- Before assembling the handle to the seat base take your cover and put it onto the front part of the base, make sure to wrap it tightly around the front but to leave a bit of room for the extra foam that will be going in. Now you can put the handle on, put the handle on the base, put the screws through, put lock washers on the screws, put your nuts on the screws, tighten safely (I used a spoon as a screwdriver to avoid over tightening and leaving my room). The handle will hold the front part of the cover on and it isn’t too hard to get at the bolts and stuff while only the front part of the cover is on.
- Once the cover is on and the handle is attached you are ready to toss your foam in. First put the KH foam in, make sure its seated right, then place the Gel on top of that.
BUMPER TIME!
- This is the only place I actually had some trouble myself. Pull the cover really tight over the seat, make sure its good and tight and not going anywhere, then wrap it around the edges of the back of the base. Now put the bumper back on overtop of the cover. I actually put the screws straight through the cover at this part as I found that they helped hold the cover on and helped the screws stay in as Viscount bumpers aren’t made to be taken off and put back on.
- The seat is still really poofy in the middle, as you have nothing to hold the sides down. This is where the wonders of shoelaces come in. Take your shoelace and wrap it around the middle in various places then tie it.
Wooo you have a solid dual density gel seat made from scrap crap!
As time goes on I’m sure I will be making a couple tweaks to it here are a couple that I have planned for the future:
- Hiding the shoelace in some way.
- Affixing the bumper in a more reliable way
- Maybe tweaking the foam a bit in some way but I don’t think that will happen.