Three Useful Products

Three Useful Products

Inmaker shoe laces

These are very short silicone laces, each one binds one side of the lace holes to the other side. They come in sets of stepped length, two sets to a package. There are several brands - they all look alike to me. The neat aspect of these laces, other than not needing to tie them, is that you can get a different tension at each position.

My goal was to tighten the front-most hole pairs to prevent my foot from sliding to the outside of the shoe, but keep the rest loose and comfortable. There were no pieces that were long enough for second part of the goal, so I have three Inmaker laces and a shortened regular lace for the rest. (I'm working on a way to splice two laces.)

These work well, although I don't know how long they will last.

Amazon search on "inmaker no tie shoelaces" on Amazon.

Roller blade desk chair wheels

The are soft rubber wheels mounted on standard desk chair hardware, easy to substitute on most desk chairs. They are quiet, smooth, and work well on hard surfaces with no mat. Most are three inch diameter and noticeably raise the chair - probably good for carpets but not probably not good for people under 5 ft 8 in. Hirate makes 2 inch wheels that have a robust looking steel mount with swivel ball bearings. Amazon search on "hirate office chair caster". Other 2 inch soft wheels are double wheels on plastic mounts with no ball bearings on the swivel - these might be great, I don't know.

Symple Stuff Aliceville Office Chair from Wayfair.com

A simple desk chair with one hard to find feature - knee tilt. By tilting "at the knee", really about eight inches in front of the seat mount strut, when you tilt, your feet stay on the floor, pretty much. Otherwise a pretty standard desk chair - cushion bottom, mesh back, height adjust, tilt, tilt tension adjust, lumbar support, lumbar height adjust, arm rests with height, angle, and width adjust. The arm rest angle adjust is annoying - it needs to lock in place. The chair works very nicely for me (5 ft 7 in). Except - the lumbar support angle lets it bite into my back. I used two zip ties around the lumbar mount (two oval plastic loops that let the support slide up and down). These squash the top of the oval loop to get the support angle where I need it - no more biting. This chair is way better than anything I could find locally.

I did not want to buy a chair without sitting in it first. At Office Depot, Staples, and a local office supply store, I found one chair that felt good. I bought it, assembled it, sat in it. After about ten minutes it hurt badly. A couple of days later it was worse. I disassembled it (a major pain) and returned it.

Wayfair was easy and shipped quickly. And I got lucky that it works for me.