IVAR Reinvented: Week 1 — Assembly and Disassembly
As the first project that spreads over a couple of weeks, I’ll be documenting the process that leads up to a new and never-seen-before IVAR.
Week 1 consisted of assembling and disassembling the IVAR chair as per the instructions, to understand the strengths and weaknesses of it, and to get a feel for the materials and tools.
As soon as I ripped over the tape around the box (which was very sturdy, and explainable), this was the sight that beheld. Pretty well organized, tbh. I don’t think I’d have arranged any of this differently, as all the parts (there’s a total of 2 sides of a chair, 1 seat, and 4 bars that provide support throughout the chair) are pretty compact. If I were being super picky though, perhaps I’d have stacked the 4 bars (that are tucked to the side in the cardboard wrapping) in a 2x2 arrangement rather than a 1x4 arrangement, and stuff it where the instructions currently are.
Also, one problem I found was that the instructions got lost in the package, and I had to hunt for them. Since they weren’t stapled either, each page was in a different location. Could have helped if the instructions were stuck (by simple tape) to the middle of the inside of the box.
Moving on, we meet the blobby dude that we know so well from IKEA. For ease, we’ll refer to him as Blob (I think he might be called IKEA Man, but I found a really interesting artist’s take on Blob: https://sedkialimam.com/work/ikea-man/). Blob is a friendly fella, as evident from the picture above :)
My goal with this assembly of IVAR was not to mess up. Full disclosure, I have never successfully put together IKEA furniture without messing up at least once. This might involve either accidently flipping one piece of the entire set the wrong way, or using the wrong screws and having to disassemble the structure to some extent to get back going the right way. In order to achieve the success this time, I followed the instructions very carefully (I end up just winging it most times).
The first few steps were rather simple. Plug in the wood plug things into the bars. Plug the bars into the sides of the chairs. Push em all together. Screw 3 screws on each side. BAM. You’ve almost got your full chair.
One issue I found though, was that the screws were very hard to screw in. They would have gone in a lot easier with an electric screw driver, but I had to use the little tool they provided since I didn’t have another alternative on me, and this took some real effort (I even have a video for my struggle, but Medium doesn’t seem to allow videos to be embedded).
Getting to the end from this point was rather easy, but posed hiccups of its own. First off, the structure required a screw driver (phillips head), and I didn’t have one on me. Luckily, the class had a few passing around, so this meant from going to impossible, to possible with waiting time. Furthermore, the seat portion of the chair didn’t have pre-made holes. One had to decide the holes for oneself. Not a hard task, but allows for room to mess up.
This is the final product! A surprisingly sturdy and uncomfortable chair that took about half an hour to build from scratch! What more could one ask for :)
Disassembly took about 15 minutes; rather intuitive to just go in the reserve order of the instructions. Packing everything went rather well too, and the end result was slightly less pretty than what I began with, but worked.
Till next time, IVAR remains sealed by my magical spell to keep it away from causing harm to civilisation :)
