Recycled 55 Gallon Barrel Chair

Today, we are going to make a surprisingly comfortable chair using only six small bolts, nuts and washers, six drywall screws, simple hand tools, a little ingenuity and a recycled 55-gallon plastic drum. Why? Well, that is a good question, partially because it is in our nature to make things, but mostly because I had a bunch of barrels that needed a purpose.

You see, I have a small business where we use a lot of all-natural vanilla extract, hundreds of gallons a month, so we buy it in large quantities. It comes to us shipped in food grade 55-gallon plastic drums, which we formerly shipped back to the manufacturer for reuse. Recent changes in food safety guidelines makes the reuse of the barrels impossible, so we now have several of these on hand. I refused to send them to the landfill and even if we wanted to, the flammable nature of vanilla extract would have classified these as "hazardous" waste. On the other hand, even though the barrels are made from recyclable plastic, our county recycling center could not process them, so it seemed to me that a better use would be to find a way to reuse them locally. I started out working on ways to reuse the barrels in our business and we have had great success with that, using them to store raw materials, in our pickling processes and even as a human powered mixer for dry materials, but still the barrel stack grew. So I expanded my views and began to use the barrels in different ways, first we made rain harvesters for ourselves and our staff and friends, then we made compost barrels for everyone, but still we had these blue barrels piling up. That is when we began working on more interesting projects and it was from one of those projects that the barrel chair was born.

We were working on a prototype for a human powered paddle wheel pontoon boat, using the barrels for the pontoons and the main paddle wheel assembly, when we decided we needed a low backed chair for the Captain to occupy as he barked orders to the people on the bicycles driving the paddle wheel, but that is another, needlessly complex and ultimately doomed, project and story. Anyway, we hit upon the idea of using half a barrel as the basis for the chair. A couple of hours later we had a surprisingly comfortable working prototype and a new focus for our endeavors . Within a week we had gone through several generations, making small design tweaks to the chair and the construction process, until we finally had a process and finished product we were happy with.

Thank you to everyone who voted for our project in the Epilog Challenge.