Turn an Old Car Seat Into a New Office Chair

Step 1

Desk jobs aren’t all bad, what with their air conditioning and livable salaries. But there’s one thing that’s been bugging us: our uncomfortable office chair. 

Most people see two options here: Suffer on an uncomfortable perch all day long, or pony up for one of those expensive “executive” chairs found in the SkyMall catalog. We’re car people, though, so we prefer a more creative solution. 

Almost anybody who’s built a car or two has an extra seat lying around, and in our case it was the stock seat from a Fiesta. Time to put it to use.

Step 2

The office chair is held to its base with four bolts near the middle, while the Fiesta seat is bolted to the car with a bolt on each corner. To bolt the Fiesta seat to the office chair base, we’d need to make an adapter.

Step 3

We used pieces of scrap steel, but you can also buy some appropriate metal at your local home improvement store. We started by cutting, drilling and bolting a piece of angle iron to either end of the seat. Then we cut two more pieces of steel to create a box. Ideally this box should match up to the office chair’s base. 

Step 4

We clamped everything together and sat the seat on the chair base to make sure everything was lined up correctly.

Step 5

Time to break out the torch and weld our steel pieces together. Don’t own a welder? Bolting the steel together will work fine, too. Once the welds were cool, we drilled four holes and bolted the steel to the base. After applying a quick coat of paint, we were ready to attach the car’s seat.

Step 6

All done. We gave it a test-sit to make sure we’d centered the weight over the base. Not surprisingly, our new chair is much more comfortable than the one it replaced.