My neighboor at the new shop is the proprietor of one of those idiosyncratic Portland institutions, the perpetual garage sale. A lot of these places have a specialty, and this guy's niche seemed to be animated plush. You know, christmas trees that sing, mounted fish that sing, rock and roll flowers, slowly writhing baby dolls, that sort of thing. He gets really excited about them and eagerly turns them on for you as you pass them on the makeshift shelves, saying things like, "Check this out... would you look at that?"

Sadly, he's moving out, and he's been slowly expunging the three car garage of all his wares over the past weeks. Lately he's been leaving the last of the stuff on the sidewalk, hoping it disappears overnight. It makes sense, he had a ton of stuff in there. So I went to the shop the other night and lo and behold, he had left behind a pair of Eames shell armchairs. They were in rough shape, the red naugahyde upholstery ripped up and the foam underneath soaked with rain and black mold. Also, at some point someone decided to spray paint the back of the chairs in velveeta orange. Thus began my weekend project.

The upholstery came off easy enough but underneath was what the Eames office called foam-in-place. After the upholstery was on the chairs, holes were drilled in the bottom of the shells and latex foam was sprayed inside, filling up the space between the fiberglass and the naugahyde. Its nasty stuff. I scraped off as much of it as I could with my hands, then used CitriStrip to soften the gluey stuff that was left sticking to the chair. It says on the label that CitriStrip can be used to get rid of epoxy, so I was a little worried that it would destroy the fiberglass. I waited just long enough for the glue to soften and then started scraping, then scrubbing with 0000 steel wool. It worked, but it wasn't easy. The spraypaint yielded more easily to the stripper. There was definitely an epoxy-ish smell coming off the shells after I sprayed the stripper on, but the fiberglass seems totally unfazed. Anyway, here's the after shot.

From what I've learned the color is called "parchment" and the bases were known as the "contract base." I've read that foam-in-place shell chairs came after they stopped using rubber shockmounts to mount the bases on, but these chairs have shockmounts. I thought at first that they were from the 70's but maybe they're earlier.