Aeron Chair Repair

kaliyama

Hello,
Just picked up an aeron chair at a yard sale for $5. It looks like the only thing wrong is that the bottom of the gas cylinder is missing. Does anyone have a rec for a good link to replacement parts and repair guides? Googling reveals an alarming bunch of procedurally generated or fly-by-night sites and there seems to be no central authority on the topic. Has anyone else fixed their own?

illig

i found ebay to be the cheapest place for the aeron replacement parts... i got a brand new seat there for under $80 shipped

but rarer replacement parts come up for auction sparingly, and then you're competing with tons of people who want the same part, usually bidding up the price beyond it's MSRP

for something like a gas cylinder, i'd buy directly from a dealer... i bought a set of hard wood casters for my aeron at ultimatebackstore.com for ~$20... you may want to give them a call

you may also check out craigslist locally, but it'll mostly have used parts rather than new ones - and have the same problem as ebay with rarer parts

DrFrylock

There are a modest number of authorized Herman-Miller repair centers/dealers around the country, and you can usually find them by Googling "authorized herman-miller repair." Most of them have a thing where you box up your chair, send it to them and they take a look at it for a fee, and then will apply that fee to repairing your chair if you want. Many of them will not list individual parts on their sites, but I found most to be very friendly if you just email them and say "hey will you sell me part such-and-such for my chair?"

eBay can be a source of parts also, although the rarer ones are more difficult to find. Putting on an eBay part will void your warranty, but since you bought the chair for $5 at a yard sale you don't have the excellent warranty anyway, so you have got little to lose.

Aerons are specifically designed to be user-repairable in many ways, and most replacements can be done with a pair of pliers, an ordinary wrench, and some Allen wrenches. I had the seat-pan on my Aeron crack after about 5 years of use (admittedly I had once slipped when sitting down and landed on it hard, which probably caused the initial problem, but it held out for a further several years after that). A new one from Herman-Miller was going for about $200, which was tough for me because that's the price of a decent new chair from Office Depot or whatever. I found a replacement seat on eBay for $100, and it turned out to be new. Took me about 15 minutes to replace and the Aeron has been good as new since.