I have been drafted - ahem requested- by my niece to build one of these for her son.  I can find a couple of vague videos of a build but no dimensions.  Anyone have one of these plans laying around?

Oh my goodness, what a neat project Ron!!!! Hey, if you can zoom enough, and get a title of a book, we can look up the book, get the dimensions of the book and scale it from there

measure some of the books and reverse engineer it..

Yup, what John & Stick said.  Seems like it could be about whatever size you want it to be.

I would want to make sure the niece understands the size of the footprint before starting.  From where I sit it looks to be a minimum of a 4'x4' chair with adequate room to get around it makes it one huge space taker upper.

Cal

This originated in Europe and these things are selling for about $5,000.  There's a guy who built one and put a video out and his skills are iffy.  Case in point, he used Gorilla glue on it.  I do know that it takes two sheets of 3/4 plywood and is 29 inches tall and the seat is 28 1/2 by 26.  Everything is pocket screwed together.  I keep looking at this thing thinking that there must be a better way than pocket screws.  Kreg, I love ya but man that's a lot of drilling.   Stick is probably right that I'll have to reverse engineer it,  Here's the original "plan".

 

http://www.instructables.com/id/Bookshelf-Chair/

Ron, I think I would like to modify the design, get rid of many of the vertical supports, those take up a lot of room for more books, and think along the line of bookshelves instead of book modules as seen in the image. You could use a sliding book end to keep the books up right if you go with shelves. Just an idea.

As far as pocket screws, those little verticals all full of pocket screws, seems like a bad design, as you alluded too. Pocket screws as you know hogs out a lot of wood, just think of each of those little vertical pieces with hogged out pocket holes in them, how long will this chair last?

Looking at the plans, if you do build it per plan, I'd engineer it with interlocking dado's, perhaps?

34 minutes ago, John Morris said:

Ron, I think I would like to modify the design, get rid of many of the vertical supports, those take up a lot of room for more books

 

.....and makes the painting more of a pain in the....! 

You can import the image into Sketchup. Using a known dimension- like the height of a book- you can rescale the entire drawing with one click. Then you can get all of the measurements from there. 

I'll not comment on the construction technique as, knowing you, you'll have that well in hand. But, the comfort-ness aspect of the design is a bit lacking. While the seat is of generous size, those hard, rigid sides with no cushioning along their top edges will not be conducive to "curling up with a good book". It looks like the top, side book shelves could be reconfigured to make room for soft arm (head?) rests.

And, an ottoman would probably be welcome, too. And, books could be stored around it, also. Probably need casters, though.

I'm sure it will be a great project, a wonderful gift for your niece and a lot of fun to build. 

Looking forward to lots of POP (pictures of progress) posts.

 

 

Sorry Ron, you simply asked if anyone had any plans laying around for this, and I launched into a redesign diatribe! As Gene stated, you got all that under control with your vast knowledge and experience. 

I to look forward to the pics as you make this happen! 

5000.00, wow! How cool is that!

Rough Sketchup idea on a similar picture-

 

Untitled.skp

 

 

All comments are valid and useful.  When you Google the thing and look at the images, there are many more comfortable looking pieces out there.  One person suggested tipping the seat back to 15 degrees.  I'm going to get my niece down here to see exactly what she wants.  Lew, thanks for the sketchup plan.

Thought I'd thow up an update on this project.  Hopeflly, I can meet with my niece this weekend to run some ideas by her but the more I look at this chair the less I like it.  It looks like something a beginning DIYer would hammer out with 2x4s and it just looks "clunkerdy" (if that's a word).  I'd rather build shelves around a chair and make the shelving adjustable.  Hopefully, I can talk her into that.  As I proceed, I'll keep you updated and maybe ev en add a Sketchup link.

With no more padding than this thing has showing I would imagine not being very comfortable. Then at that price, somebody has to be kidding....to shell out that much money. Maybe it cost to be different???.