Aluminum Folding Chair – Lightweight Yet Strong Seat with Backrest for Outdoor Fishing, Travel, and Compact Storage
Aluminum Folding Chair – Lightweight Yet Strong Seat with Backrest for Outdoor Fishing, Travel, and Compact Storage
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A chair with arms, not a sling on legs
Most portable chairs ask you to give something up. The bag chair swallows you into a sagging fabric bucket you have to fight your way out of. The little tripod stool has nothing to lean on. The camp stool is fine for ten minutes and punishing for an hour.
This is the other kind. It is a compact director's-style chair: two rigid aluminum armrests, a flat taut seat that does not sag into a hammock, and a proper upright backrest stretched between two uprights. You sit on it rather than in it, and you can push down on the arms to stand up — which is the thing every low sling chair takes away from you, and the reason this shape keeps getting bought for parents and grandparents.
The frame is aluminum alloy tube rather than steel, which is what keeps it light enough to carry in one hand, and the seat and back are Oxford-weave polyester.
It folds flat — arms, back and all
The armrests are usually the reason a chair like this will not pack down. Here the backrest hinges forward onto the seat first, and then the whole X-frame scissors shut, so the arms fold in with everything else and the chair collapses into a flat slab rather than an awkward bundle of tubes.
That is the whole trade this chair is making: you get armrests and a real back, and you still get something that lies flat in a trunk, behind a car seat, down the side of a closet, or in the gap behind a shed door.
The pocket on the side
There is a soft fabric organizer hanging on the outside of the seat rail, with a mesh pocket stitched onto the front of it. A drink stands up in the mesh; a phone, keys, a headlamp or a fishing license go in the sleeve behind it.
It is a small thing and it is the difference between a chair you sit in and a chair you settle into — because the alternative is putting your phone on wet grass.
We are not going to give you a weight limit
This page used to carry one. We have taken it off, and you deserve to know why, because on a chair it is the number that matters most.
The figure that was here could not be traced to any document for this chair. Our supplier's own written specification does not state a tested load rating, and the numbers you find attached to superficially similar chairs run from about a hundred kilos to nearly four hundred pounds depending on whose listing you read. Any one of them would have been a guess dressed up as a specification.
A wrong weight limit on a chair is not a marketing error, it is someone hitting the ground. So we would rather publish nothing and say so plainly. We will publish a tested load rating here as soon as our supplier provides one in writing.
If a certified load rating is something you actually need — for a venue, a rental fleet, an employer, or simply because you want the certainty — please buy a chair whose seller can hand you the test report. We would rather lose the sale.
Where it works, and where it will annoy you
The feet are capped aluminum tube — narrow, and round. On anything firm they are perfect: decking, patio slabs, gravel, a hard-packed riverbank, a garage floor, a tiled kitchen when you need a spare seat at the table.
On soft ground they behave like any narrow-footed chair does. Put it on wet grass, loose dry sand or churned mud with your weight in it and the feet will work their way down and the chair will start to lean. That is physics, not a fault, and it is true of every chair built on this frame. A flat board, a paving slab or a groundsheet under the feet solves it completely if you are camping somewhere soft.
Our supplier's own guidance recommends it for hard flooring. We think that is too cautious for what people actually do with it — but it is the reason we are being straight with you about soft ground rather than showing you a picture on a sand dune.
Keeping it clean
Wipe it down with a damp cloth and let it dry before you fold it away. That is the supplier's instruction and it is the one we will pass on. Do not put it in a washing machine. The seat and back are tensioned panels that are part of the structure of the chair, not slipcovers designed to come off and go through a cycle — an earlier version of this page said they were, and that was wrong.
Specifications
On dimensions. Our supplier lists four figures for this chair — 44, 55, 82 and 50 cm (17.3, 21.7, 32.3 and 19.7 in) — without saying which is which, and we have not been able to confirm the labels against a measured unit. Rather than guess at a seat height and have you plan a car trunk around it, we are flagging it. If exact dimensions decide the purchase for you, please ask us before you order.
Who this is right for. Anyone who wants a real chair to sit on away from the house — the touchline, the campsite, the riverbank, the driveway, the garage, the balcony — and wants it to fold flat and live in the trunk between uses. It is particularly good as a spare chair for guests, and as a chair for someone who needs armrests to get up comfortably.
Who it is not right for. Anyone who wants to sink back and recline — this sits you upright, deliberately. Anyone hiking any real distance, because a chair with rigid arms will never pack as small as a stripped-down backpacking stool. And anyone who needs a documented load rating today, for the reasons set out above.
