How to assemble a gaming chair? 2 mistakes to watch out for

Here are the most common mistakes we make when we build gaming chairs - and how to avoid them

Table of Contents Table of Contents

If you’re wondering how to assemble a gaming chair, you’re in luck, dear reader, as we’ve built a lot of gaming chairs over the years.

This means that we’ve messed it up a lot too, and we’ve learned from our mistakes, so now we are keenly aware of how easy it is to mess up and the precautions to take so you can avoid it. We have chairs to spare, you probably don’t.

Additionally, a lot of gaming chairs come with woefully mistranslated assembly instructions, which then forces the user to improvise. Sometimes even the diagrams are cooked too.

As each gaming chair varies slightly, we can’t write one guide to rule them all, but we can give you some advice on how to avoid the three most common mistakes we see people make.

Mistake 1: Wonky backrest

The most common mistake we see doesn’t actually result in an unusable chair, but it can make the well-designed, aesthetically-pleasing product you paid a lot for look worse than you’d like

Chances are you didn’t get help to build your chair, which does make things harder to get right, and one of these things is the backrest.

By and large, the backrest is attached to the seat base with a couple of bolts on either side. If you fully tightened one side before moving to the other, the backrest won’t seat symmetrically.

This is why your dad told you to tighter the nuts on a car wheel in a star-shaped pattern. It prevents it from being unevenly fastened.

READ NOW: Corsair TC200 gaming chair review

So, in order to avoid this, tighten one side slightly, then the other. Repeat this over and over until both sides are tightened evenly, which will ensure that your chair is nice and symmetrical.

Mistake 2: Uneven armrests

Gaming chair armrests are usually fastened to the underside of the seat base with 3 bolts in a triangle shape. This is all well and good for making sure the armrests don’t protrude from the chair at wild angles, as those 3 holes are pre-drilled for you.

However, the bolts destined for these holes pass through long slots on the armrests. This is intentional as it means that you can adjust how far apart the armrests are, however, it also makes it really easy to mess up.

The easiest solution to this is to install the armrests as far apart, or as close together as possible, as either of these extremes can’t be messed up.

Unfortunately, this is a less-than-ideal solution for those of you who are precious about the spacing between the armrests.

The best way of having them somewhere between the two extremes is to use a measuring tape and make markings on the armrests before installing them, so you can visually see if you’re getting it wrong or not.