they should make recliners that recline even if you are small
recliners that don't tip backwards when you are large would also be appreciated
I propose an alliance against a common enemy
Y'all are sitting in the wrong size of recliners... It's a leverage issue.
If you're tall, you're applying your force at the very top of the chair when you go back... That multiplies your effort to exert more force. Combined with you just straight-up having more mass, that means you apply enough force to tip the whole chair over. You need a larger chair, with more mass in the base. (And probably a larger gauge of spring inside, too.)
The smaller person is having the opposite problem. It's a different kind of lever, but the same fundamental relationship:
The bottom of a chair is a second-class lever, with effort extended on the opposite end from the pivot, and resistance applied between them. But you still have the same issue: the effort is intended to applied at the very end, and you're applying it closer to the fulcrum, thereby cutting the down on the effective force.
And these differences can be significant! Even within manufacturers. The distance from the base of the seat to the end of the foot-rest on the La-Z-Boy Pinnacle model is about 40", of which less than half is the foot-rest part; in a La-Z-Boy Redwood, it's 5" longer. Which means that if you put a small person in a Redwood, their force is going to be exerted about 5" closer to the fulcrum than it should be.
(There's also 2 different recliner mechanisms: la-z-boy's, which is patented, and everyone else's, which isn't. You actually don't get that putting-the-chair-down problem in a la-z-boy, because la-z-boys you HAVE to use the handle. But that's beside the point.)
Anyway tl;dr the chairs don't suck, they're just not the right size for you!
thanks so much! I’ll just whip on over to the friendly neighborhood small people furniture store now that I know the only problem is my ignorance of physics.
You're being sarcastic, but I used to sell furniture and you would not believe how many people did not understand this very thing. Then they're trying to replace a chair with another chair that is going to exactly the same thing because they don't know what the real problem is. Now you know! Different issue if you can't afford to replace the chair right now, but most furniture stores should have plenty of different sizes.
this is about Every Chair And Public Access it literally is not that hard to give a chair people will be sitting on a locking mechanism so that anyone can use it without doing a Goldilocks routine at the movie theatre or the dr’s office Jesus Christ
