Camping
Camping Chairs
Introduction
Part of camping is to have a comfortable chair to sit on. The chair must be able to fold away easily, and have a very small footprint when packed. These items are not as easy to find as you would think. I will try to show my irritations with camping chairs that are currently available to me.
Spider Chair
Over a period of several years, we bought six of these chairs. Unfortunately, these chairs do not last. The plastic hinge under the seat degrades with time, leaving you with a useless piece of metal and plastic. This is especially irritating when you don't have an alternative seat.
The Spider Chair
The hinge under the seat
I don't have any images of the broken hinge to show, but it is not nice to have someone ending up on the ground when it breaks.
The chair itself is pretty comfortable, other than a problem with the armrests sliding down the backrest poles.
The armrest retaining ring
The armrest is held in position by a retaining ring, but this ring slides down as you move to and from the the chair. You end up having to be continually moving it up to get the armrest to a comfortable position.
The right armrest does have a drinks holder and a goodie bag, but if the drinks holder contains a heavy-ish item, it will also cause the armrest ring to slide down.
The drinks holder and the goodie bag
The chair folds up very easily by pulling the two backrest poles or armrest poles together. It comes with a carry bag which is fairly compact, but it is over a metre long, which does make it a little difficult to pack as the back of the bakkie is only 1.5m long.
The chair folded and in its bag
Update (28 March 2023) As the spider chairs are far more comfortable than any other, we used them on our trip to Ruah Park. On the first afternoon, another chair broke, in a different place to that mentioned earlier. The plastic footplate which holds three of the support struts broke, leaving the chair unusable (fortunately, we had packed another chair in case this happened).
Broken footpiece
The main pic shows how the upright has slipped out of the footpiece. The insert shows where it should be, and where the plastic broke off the footpiece.
As this looked fixable, I tried a DIY repair with a piece of baling wire.
Repairing broken chair
In the left hand pic, you can see my repair job, using the existing screw as an anchor point. In the right hand pic, you can see how I taped the ends of the wire to prevent damage to the chair or the bag. Time will tell if this works.
Unfortunately, this broke on the first camp after I fixed it.
Director's Chair
Because of the rather straight back, this is not the most comfortable chair to sit on for any length of time. We had a choice between two different brands - one from Makro and one from Camp and Climb. The one from Makro was cheaper, but appreciably heavier than the on from Camp and Climb, so we went with the lighter chair.
The Director's Chair
This chair uses a friction/tension method to keep it open. To open it, you press downward on the seat frame. Pat does have a bit of a problem opening this chair.
The attached side table is more useful than one realizes when camping.
The side table
If you look at the armrest next to Squeaky's head in the picture above, you will notice some foam sticking out of the covering. This covering has a minute piece of foam along length of the cover. This meant that the cover slid around with the slightest touch. Fortunately, the cover is held together by a piece of velcro, so we placed a thickish piece of sponge on the opposite side to the existing foam and squashed it to close the velcro. This went a long way to stopping the cover from sliding around. It was also softer on the arm!
The chair folds up quite flat, and when folded it's quite easy to find a hole for it to fit into when packing the bakkie.
The folded chair
The biggest problem with this chair is folding it up. The trick is to put your knee on the seat and the pull up the frame of the seat. Pat cannot do this as she is too short, and overbalances when she tries. The mechanism is extremely stiff and it requires a fair amount of brute force.
Folding the chair
I have been using this chair daily during lockdown and oiled the joints on several occasions, but it remains extremely difficult to close.
Old Style Chair
We used to have this old style folding chair.
An older style folding chair
These chairs served us really well on our travels through Africa, but unfortunately, the wear and tear over the years took its toll, and they eventually had to be thrown away. As a replacement, we ended up going for the spider chairs, as these are quite comfortable. However, as I mentioned above, the spider chairs did not last. When we started looking at camping again (when corona struck), we had to also start looking at chairs An option was the old style chair we had, but these are now unbelievably hard to find. They have almost entirely been replaced by spider chairs in the marketplace.
So we went with the director's chair, but as I mentioned above, this also has its problems.
(updated: 28 March 2023)
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