I ATTEMPTED to make a chair that rolls up... It didn't go as planned...

I came across this picture of a chair that can roll up, and I was instantly intrigued. How does this work, and can it actually hold a human being? So off to Google I went, and I discovered that it was designed by a design student named Eros Vitas, probably butchering that name, and he called it the Miss Rollo Chair. Great, so it has a name. Maybe it was produced, and I could find out some more information about it. Nope, just this one picture that is clearly Photoshopped, so I'm going to have to build this myself to see if this actually works. So I started out on SketchUp by drawing out some circles to create the side profile curve of the chair, and then I connected those circles, drew some lines to extend out the bottom, and then I could just delete all the lines that were intersecting at all the excess part of the circle, and I was left with this side profile curved shape. Awesome. So then I needed to break this up into segments to figure out how many parts that I need and at what angle to cut them to make the round curved shape. So SketchUp makes this really easy to do because when you actually draw circles, you're not drawing a circle. You're drawing a bunch of lines in the shape of a circle. So if you go into Entity Info, you can decide how many segments your shape is going to be. So if you type in three, you're going to make a triangle, but we don't want that. We want a circle. So let's say 48 here. So this circle has 48 segments. Then you do an offset of about an inch, and then it's very easy to just connect the dots and make the lines to break up a circle into segments. And then you could also use the protractor tool to figure out at what angle you need to cut those segments to make that curve. SketchUp is pretty cool. Anyway, so then I just had to push-pull all the parts to turn it into a 3D-looking object, and now I have a really cool-looking chair. I just had to add up all the parts that I needed, and it turns out that I need 132 pieces in total. 18 of them need to be 20 inches long, and 114 need to be four inches long. Out of the 20-inch long pieces, eight will be square, and 10 will need angles cut down the sides. Out of the four-inch pieces, 42 are square, and 72 have angles. So in total, there are 82 angled pieces, which will need to be ripped to 1 5 16ths inch wide, and 50 square pieces that need to be ripped to one inch wide. So here we are. I printed out a cut list so that I can make the most out of my boards. Really excited to test this out. I'm working with this nine-foot-long 5-quarter maple to make up this chair. So you might think that it would be easier to rip this up into strips first, but there's really just no room in my shop to do that. So first I'll break this down at the miter saw into smaller segments. I'm just rough cutting these to size now. I want the final dimension for the longer pieces to be 20 inches long, and the final dimensions for the shorter pieces to be four inches long. So I have to cut these longer than the actual 20 inches to make up for the blade curve when I chop this up into smaller pieces. Since there are two different width strips that I need here, I'm going to start with the wider ones first. And a lot of people ask me what kind of blades I use on my saw. Most of the time I use a thin kerf combo blade, but when I'm ripping a ton of material like this, I'll swap to a dedicated ripping blade. Also thin kerf, because full kerf blades bog down this particular saw. I'm going to link down to a bunch of different blade options that you can find at Woodcraft in the description box down below. Now I'll mill the rest into the thinner one inch wide pieces. So some of these pieces are going to be long and stay at 20 inches, but most of them are going to be chopped up into four inches long. So before I chop them up, I'm going to first add the angles on them that's going to create the curve. As far as the angle goes, remember on SketchUp I use the protractor tool and the angle turned out to be like 86 point something. So the actual angle really doesn't matter at all because I just printed out the picture from SketchUp and I could just use a sliding bevel to line it up on that angle there. I don't even need to know what the number is. I'll rip this angle onto both edges of the wider pieces that I cut. And I don't have to change the fence for these cuts because it's not changing the width of the material. The top of that angled cut is right in line with the width of the material. I just had to be mindful of the direction that I was putting these boards through. And I also had to be careful that I was only taking from the correct pile that was on my workbench. You may have noticed that I got some burning on some of the pieces and all of them are all at the same exact spot. That's right where I had to pause for a moment to put my push stick on. So the blade was slow in that area and that's why it burnt. But I could just take a few quick passes with a hand plane and it's going to clean that right up. Now it's nice and clean, no sanding required. Awesome. While I'm doing all this hand planing, just a quick word from this week's sponsor, Ariat. I've been wearing these Ariat work clothes for the past few months and I highly recommend them. The Ariat work jacket I've been wearing in all of my latest videos is totally helping me stay warm while I work without feeling restricted. Look at how I'm able to fully extend my arms while I'm planing these pieces. That's because of the four-way stretch in the DuraCanvas material. It's really just so awesome. Ariat also makes high quality base layers so I can bundle up even more and continue to work. Not only are the clothes super tough wearing and comfortable, I think they look pretty cool too. The work boots I've been wearing are great. I'm on my feet all day so this is so important to me. And while I'm wearing the women's line, they also make work wear for men, like these pull-on work boots that I thought were really cool. So if you're looking for really high quality, durable work wear that looks great too, check out the links in the description box down below. All right, back to work. Even the ones that don't have burn marks, I'm running with my hand plane because it's just leaving such a superior finish, like way better than sanding can ever do. Now time to cut everything to length. So I'll start with the longer 20-inch pieces in case I make a mistake. And according to my calculations, eight of them are going to be from the square ones and 10 have the angles. So I took those pieces over to the table saw and I used my crosscut sled to make all those cuts. First, I just made one end of them square and then using my stop block, I could cut the rest to 20 inches long. Since there are so many pieces on this project, organization is key. I had to make sure that I was always taking from the correct pile so that I wasn't cutting into anything that I wasn't supposed to be cutting into. Next, I had to take the rest of the pieces and cut those into the four-inch long strips. I did that once again on the crosscut sled on my table saw and I just adjusted my stop block to four inches long to cut all of those pieces. That's a lot of work for something that I don't even know is gonna work out yet. Oh, really? Yeah. Now I won't bore you with all the sanding footage, but I just needed to break all the edges. Since I used a hand plane on the faces, there was really minimal sanding that I needed to do on these pieces. Just need to knock off the sharp edges so that it's nice to touch. I can't feel my hands anymore, so I'm going to bring this all inside so I can finish it up where it's nice and warm. So I have this printout from SketchUp where it shows which piece goes in what order. So I'll just follow this and lay everything out on the floor here. Not a piece to spare. In the original picture, it looks like he's using some sort of felt material that's holding all of the pieces together, but I can't wrap my head around what sort of glue would be strong enough to hold the felt onto the wood while there's a person sitting on it. So I'm going to use this webbing. This is a really strong and tough material. I think it's like polypropylene or something like that. And I'm not going to glue it onto the pieces because it's hard to find a glue that would work with this material. So I'm just going to screw it down onto the pieces. And I'm using these finish washers along with the screws. I made a drilling template so I can make sure to pre-drill the holes in the same location on all the pieces, and then started locking it all down with the finish washers and screws. This actually took way longer than I thought it was going to take. And then I tested out the bend. All right, so the bottom bend here has way too much give in it. There's no way that's going to support a person. I'm going to unscrew everything that I just did and try to think of another way. All right, the problem wasn't that the webbing had too much give in it. A little bit of give in a chair like this would be great. It would feel like a rocker and it'd be really comfortable. The problem was that it was stretching and then it wasn't returning back to its original shape. So the whole chair would just like fall flat and stay flat. So I had to think about a material to use that will stretch and then return back to shape, kind of like a rubber band would do. And I think that the answer has been under my nose this whole time. I've been using this yoga mat to protect my knees while I'm working on the floor here. And this is a natural rubber material. And I think that I'm going to cut this up and use this as the material that's going to hopefully hold this chair into its shape. No idea if this is going to work. I'm not going to cry over cutting up the yoga mat because I haven't done yoga in quite some time. This is either going to be a disaster or be amazing. Rubber is really hard to glue. So I tried out a few different glues and found this one that seemed to work really well and just started gluing it down. It seemed like it was holding the pieces together and that this would possibly work. So I continued just applying the glue and holding the rubber in place for a few seconds. And this actually took quite a while. Also note that I had to remove a bunch of the pieces to make up for the length of the yoga mat. And I wasn't paying attention to where I was removing the pieces. I just took random ones. Big mistake. My life choices. And for anyone concerned, I had the windows open while I was applying the glue. So the rubber alone isn't going to hold everything together. It's just there to bring everything back to shape. So this was polypropylene webbing. And after doing some more research, I found out that polyester webbing is stronger and has less of a stretch. So this is like what they use to make seat belts. So I'm going to use this. And instead of drilling holes in here to screw it down, I'm going to use a soldering iron and I'm going to burn holes in it. I'm using a tip that I don't normally use. So I don't care if it gets all gunked up here. I really hope this works. All right. This was the drilling guide that I use to drill all the holes. And I'll use that to mark out where I'm going to burn the holes. And lock it into place. The point of drilling the holes is to prevent fraying. If you just drill a hole, the fabric might pull and fray and it might fall apart. I really honestly have no idea if this is going to work, but it made sense to me. And it was fun to do. I made sure to put extra screws where I would need more support, like by the seat. For this section over here, I'm actually going to pull the webbing tighter than I think I should. And I'll just attach it up at this point over here. So there'll be a little gap here, but I think that's going to hold its shape just a little bit better. At least I think this is what's going to happen. All right. Just wrap it around the back here and test it out. I just tried to flip it over so I can test it out. And the rubber completely ripped. That was a really bad idea. I don't know what to do now. I think I'm just going to have to put the screws in all the pieces. And the rubber was just a really bad idea. And it made it look horrible because there's all this puckering because it's like cushioning the washer. And I ruined my yoga mat. I don't know why I'm still trying here because the rubber keeps breaking. I'm just going to keep screwing down the pieces. Maybe it's going to work. So I probably should have given up here, but I was determined to see if this polyester webbing would work. Okay, so it rolls up. Let's see how it works to sit on it. There's no way this is going to work. I don't even know where to find out. Nope. You guys just saw that, right? Okay, so that yoga mat was an awful, awful idea, but I'm in the center here. And watch, that feels fine. I feel like the webbing is completely supporting me. So I think that I'm onto something here. This whole method was a total fail with the yoga mat, whatever. I'm going to try something else. I had to sleep on this one because honestly, I just wanted to chop this up as a fail or lessons learned, but I feel like I was really close. I feel like I was really onto something. I think that webbing could work on its own, and I should just go back to my original plan of just using the webbing and the screws, but I redrew the SketchUp drawing. So this is the original one, and now this is the new one. I compensated for the stretch. So I took out some of the pieces in there so that it will be out a little bit, but then when it bends, it will go into a comfortable position. I'm gonna take apart everything that I just did and try again. Now I have to peel off the yoga mat, which is not going to be easy because that glue was kind of strong. And then I used a chisel to clean up most of the mess. I wasn't worried about getting it completely perfect. Just wanted to get off the bulk that was sticking up. Here was the old picture. Now I'm going to follow this new picture for where to line up all the pieces. All right, so here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to use the webbing as the main strength and structure for everything, and I'm just going to attach it with staples. I'm going to double it up. I have this gray one, and I also had this black one because I wasn't sure when I ordered them if I was going to want gray or black. So I can double them up right next to each other. So that's going to add extra strength there. And then I'll cover it up with another material, and this is just going to not be seen. Here we go. Well, that staple gun was not strong enough to go through the maple, so I just ran to the store and got a new one. Hopefully this one works. This actually took me quite some time to do, and it was not so easy. Some of the staples were not going in all the way, and as I was doing it, my son was asking me to list all of the words that I know that start with the letter E. Good times. Back at it for another day. I paused right over here because I was having trouble holding the pieces and tacking it down because right in this section over here, this is where the pieces curve this way, and I couldn't hold these pieces tightly next to each other and pull the strap and use the staple gun. If I was in my shop right now, I would probably build some sort of jig that's like the same shape of this curve to hold everything into place, but I'm not. So what I think I'm going to do here is use some tape on the sides of both the pieces, and then I'll use the CA glue to temporarily hold them into place while I tack everything down. I know that there's going to end up being a tiny gap in between the two pieces when I then remove the tape, but right now I'm not striving for perfection. I really just want to see if this idea is going to work, so I'm okay with that. Let's do it. So I'll be covering everything up with this felt that I cut yesterday, and I think what I should do now in order to keep this curve is to attach this now. So I have that same drilling template that I used before, except this time I made the holes a little bit wider because the material here is going to be wider, and I'll just start pre-drilling some holes down in here and keep building it up, I think. Let's do it. I still really like the look of the black finish washers and the black screws. I think it's a cool look, so I'm hoping this will work. I know that this material is going to stretch, so maybe I'll try to stretch it before I attach it. Crazy. Okay. Guys, just in case you couldn't tell from my whispering, I was really excited about this. It was going so smoothly, and I thought the finish washers looked pretty cool against the felt, and then I had to figure out the curvy part. All right, so here's the process that I figured out worked for me. I would put the CA glue onto the tape and use the accelerator spray, and then I can use the template and put it on the piece, the drilling template, and then lift up on the whole chair so that the bottom of that piece was parallel and resting on the floor, and that way I had the leverage to drill straight down. And then to put the screws in, exactly the same thing. I had to lift up on the chair so that the bottom of the piece was resting on the floor and that I was able to just drive straight down and drive the screw into place. And again, if I was in my shop, I would probably make some sort of jig to hold these pieces into place instead of lifting them up with my leg. This was going smoothly, but I was quickly able to tell that the angle of the curve was just off. And in retrospect, I should have placed all the pieces on their sides so that I could see what the final shape would look like. And even though I saw that the back curve was off, I still powered through and added more screws on the bottom curve so that I can just test this whole thing out. And finally added screws to the top and bottom pieces to wrap it up. And I was done. And now I just need to remove all the tape that was in between all the pieces. All right, first, let's see how it rolls up. Okay, so that's kind of cool. All right, now let's see if it works as a chair. Okay, so it looks like a chair without holding it. See if it'll hold me. Okay, again. Again, so like right here, right at the top of the arc, I feel really supported. But as you can clearly see, the angle is just completely off. If I were to lean back, I would just be down all the way to the floor. I'm just gonna call this one a fail. Well, attempt number one, it was a fail. I'm definitely going to try this again because I think that there is some potential here because I do feel supported at the top of this arc. So there's something to this. I started off this video by asking, how does this work and can it hold a person? So I feel like I'm getting closer to figuring out how it could work. And I think that it might be able to hold a person, just not the way that it's currently built. So I've learned a ton from this, so I'm not upset that I tried. I'm upset that it doesn't work right now, but I'm really happy that I tried because I learned a few things. Number one is don't use expensive hardwoods in your prototypes. I really thought this was going to work. Like I really thought this was going to be an easy project. I was just going to cut up some wood and screw on a strap in order to connect all the pieces. And it didn't work. That's why I decided to use maple though, because I thought it was going to look cool. I wanted it to look good. And I really thought it was going to work. But using the maple just caused nothing but problems. I had stripped some screws. I broke a drill bit. The staples didn't go in easily. So prototyping, use soft woods like pine. So on version two, I'm definitely going to use pine to try to figure this all out. Number two, I guess, would be to test out the materials that you're going to use. So the yoga mat. Ah, the yoga mat. I was so concerned with finding a glue that was going to work on the rubber that I neglected to test out the strength of the rubber when it is pulled and stretched. So I should have tested more on that aspect. I'm still not done with the rubber idea though. That rubber is no good, but I still think that a rubber could work. Maybe if I just need to find the right material. I think that has potential there, I think. And last but not least, I guess, it's okay to fail. This is not the first time that I failed and it definitely will not be the last time that I failed. I just have to walk away from this just knowing that I learned some things. I'm really happy that I tried. I tried, I failed. Next time when I try it again, hopefully I won't make the same mistakes and I'm going to learn from everything that I just did. I mean, come on, like this really has potential, right? Like I'm sitting comfortably right now. All right, so I really wanted it to work, but there will be a next time. I'm going to try this again. I will definitely attempt this again at some point, just not sure when. I know that this angle over here needs to be changed and maybe these pieces over here just need a steeper angle. Pieces here need to be removed. I don't know, different materials. I will try again. So thank you guys so much for watching. Thank you to Ariat and Woodcraft for sponsoring this video and I'll see you guys on the next one, which I hope will not be a fail. All right, moving on. Oh wait, before I go, I totally forgot. What would you guys have done differently? I want to hear what you guys would do. How would you make something like this work? I'm really curious and maybe I'll implement those ideas on my next try. All right, see you on the next one, bye. What? Make Jenga. I'm making a video here. That was a Jenga game. No.