Highly Technical Engineering Problem

After some years rolling around in my office, the wheels on my office chair have become so clogged with pet hair and other stuff that they will barely turn anymore.

It does not appear to be a trivial job to clean them. Does anyone have a suggestion that is better than painstakingly trying to pick out the detritus with tweezers or some such?

tanstaafl.

Similar to cleaning this same situation on the beater of a vacuum cleaner: I have found that cutting the hairs en masse makes them come out much more quickly. Sharp pointed scissors and a bit of digging.

I personally replaced the wheels on my chairs with RollerBlade style wheels. (amazon link).

Same here! And not because of accumulated pet hair, but rather because they roll so much more easily and don't wear on the hardwood floors like the originals.

Note that IKEA chairs use an oddball wheel mount, so there are no good alternatives there. But for most other brands, the Rollerblade style will just pop in and work.

Third on the roller wheels. I think I paid $25 for the set I got off Amazon. If your floor has a slope, the chair will roll away!

I like the rollerblade wheels idea. As Tony suggests, an Xacto knife (or good pen knife) will cut them up making removal relatively easy.

-jk

Agreed on replacing them. It's usually extremely easy (turn the chair over and yank out the casters with your hand).

I think these are the kind I bought. I got them because my big chair and big self were creating grooves in the hardwood floor. Plastic mats kept falling apart. These casters fixed the problem and made rolling much easier. The only potential tricky part is matching the post size.

There are many different rollerblade-style wheels for sale on Amazon, and most of the one-star reviews share a common complaint: After half a year (or less) of use, the axle supports bend, the ball bearings fall out all over the floor, and the chair becomes immobile. I looked at many different ones, and would be reluctant to try them, especially at $6--$10 per wheel!

My old wheels have held up for more than 10 years, and they work just fine on my tile floor. About 10 minutes per wheel with proper tools put them back to "as-new" functionality.

tanstaafl.

I've had three different kinds of the "roller blade" wheels and they never bent. And I'm not a small guy.

You could have tried a blow torch?

I considered that, but my torch is MAP gas, much hotter than a normal propane torch, and because the hair was packed and wrapped really tightly around the wheel spindle, it would have partially burned, partially melted/congealed into an immovable mass.

The hacksaw blade worked well, inserted so that it cut on the backstroke. It was thin enough to get between the spindle support and the wheel, and because the blade insertion was "backwards" it tended to pull the hair out of the wheel enclosure as it cut it.

tanstaafl.