Your Own Meditation Chair for Dummies

meditation chair

We run across some remarkably clueless do-it-yourself plans as we wander the back roads of eHow.com – by which we mean the niches into which Leaf Group stuffs posts from the one-time laughingstock of content farms. Some of the worst are those written by freelancers who simply have no idea how to make something with their hands. We've already seen Amma Marfo¹ twice attempting to provide DIY instructions, and she's back for a third time with the Classroom.com post, "How to Build a Meditation Chair."

We aren't big on meditation here at the Antisocial Network, but we were quite capable of looking up "meditation chairs" at Amazon. There are a lot of styles, one of which seems to correspond to Telsch-Williams' illustration, at least what it would look like if not over-inflated. It's Marfo's instructions that don't seem to match...
In the interminable list of "things needed," Amma included the following:

"'One piece of 1-inch-thick plywood, 16x16 inches square', '2 2x2-inch boards, 16 inches long'"...

The limited availability of 1-inch plywood notwithstanding (it would be perfectly acceptable to use a panel of ¾-inch plywood), Amma obviously did not know that 2-by-2s aren't two inches on a side. That's why she instructed the reader to,

"Set two of the 2x2-inch, 16-inch long boards down, spaced 12 inch [sic] apart. Lay the third board down in between the two. Apply wood glue to the top surface of the boards. Place the 16-inch plywood down over top of the boards. Nail through the plywood and into the 2x2 inch boards."

Besides the ambiguity of "Lay the third board down in between the two" – what third board? lay it where? at what orientation? – placing a pair of 16-inch 2-by-2s twelve inches apart does not make a 16-inch square as Marfo seemed to think; it makes a 15" by 16" rectangle. That misconception renders her instructions for adding a "back" somewhat questionable:

"Stand the 3x3 inch posts on their ends and set at the corners of one side of the square. Add wood glue anywhere the posts meet the chair frame. Nail into place."

Besides the limited availability of 3-by-3s, Amma was once again ambiguous. Presumably, the "posts" are supposed to be glue-nailed to one of the 2-by-2s, but she didn't actually say that. Marfo also wanted to make a crosspiece for the back, but she thought a 10-inch 2-by-2 will fit snugly into the space between the 3-by-3s (it won't, since they'll be 11" apart).

The sloppy instructions, the failure to grasp the size of dimensional lumber, the incomplete materials list: all of them lead to Marfo's third Dumbass of the Day award. Go, Amma...

¹ All of Marfo's posts were originally credited to someone named Margaret Telsch-Williams who looks nothing like her and has a completely different bio; the images often still are (including for this post). Go figure.

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