Finished Chair

seat cover

While I stitched the seat myself, I deferred all stitch choices and techniques to my mother’s advice.
I’m told that I’ve used double sticked straight stick. Top Stick has was used for extra strength the narrow side is a French seam, as this was on only way to stick the seat cover onto the design, because there was no other way to twist the chair around to fit the within a sowing machine.
The ends are hand stitched with tacked ends for extra strength.

cleaning off type

Cleaning the text of the PVC pipe proved to be quite difficult, after trying a number of different products I eventually found one thing that reliably removed the printed type, and it was actually Brasso; a brand of metal polish.
Reliably removing the print equates to scrubbing the surface relentlessly.
After removing the text from the entire chair, I polished up the surface using Novus fine scratch remover to buff up the surface and dull done the scratches on the surfaces.

Chair Joints

The part joints are made from aluminium tube which I outsourced to get lathed up (My uncle) and then screws I picked out for their inconspicuous-ness. The outer shell of the joints are made of two pieces of PVC pipe cut and shaped with a curved file by hand. Between the PVC pipe covering and the internal Aluminium is a brace made out of two pieces of thread spools from a sowing machine.

Closing the gap in the plastic

Now that I had the two leg forms I needed to join the gaps where the pipe bent around to meet itself, firstly the pipe had to have the exist material cut down so the two edges would align. Following this the pipe still had a twist in it, holding the two edges together would only result in them springing apart one the pressure was removed, to fix this I used a heat gun and heated the middle of the pipe on the opposite side to the two ends I was trying to join. Once the plastic was heated and mouldable it stopped springing apart when I held the ends together, and because I was only applying a minute twist force on the PVC pipe there was no need to brace the inside with sand when I heated it.  

Now that the Pipe was aligned came the task of closing the gap, the obvious choice was to brace it internally then keep it glued shut. To do this I heated the end the smaller pipe I was placing internally and then shoved in inside the larger pipe so it shaped to closely match its form.
I then covered the internal pipe and both edges with BGC Stud Adhesive then placed the smaller pipe inside the larger and held the gap closed until the adhesive dried.  

The final touch was cutting and sanding back the unevenness around the join, actually did this with a scalpel blade first then sand paper.