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Here’s a short video showing how to repair a manual recliner mechanism and a couple of issues you may face.
This particular video was produced by the US-based 3:23 Concept.
Recliner Bitz is based in Australia and we ship around the country. Get a great deal on your replacement recliner cables and levers and handles. Or see our recliner brackets & clips and handles with cables.
How to Repair a Manual Recliner Mechanism
Hey, everybody, Boon White with the 323 Concept Furniture Restoration.
Today we’re going to be looking at how to repair a manual recliner mechanism .
1) How they operate
2) A couple of issues that you might see during repair
Alright, so this is a close-up of the side of your mechanism. See the handle right here, when I pull that lever, you’re activating this cable and it pulls this lever down, A lot of the time, if you’re pulling that lever and nothing’s happening, this cable might have come loose right here. So that is one of the main issues I see is that it just pops loose sometimes.
Another issue is that this whole lever mechanism (which just has a bolt and a nut on this side of the mechanism) sometimes comes completely loose. It can be a little bit tedious to get it back on there, just because it’s such a small working space, especially when this mechanism is mounted inside of your recliner. However, it is doable and if you have any trouble, just call a local furniture repair person.
When you pull this lever, what’s going to happen is this lever right here inside the mechanism will push that down, and if this has come loose or is broken and you can’t get it reconnected, to get the mechanism out of the way, you can always push this down manually and it’ll get it out of your way for you.
But I just wanted to show you that is how it operates, and that’s a couple of the issues that might have caused this to come loose.
I’m gonna show you how to re-install one of these just in case you do come across that issue, and if you have to replace this cable altogether if it’s broken. Usually, it disconnects up and here by the handle. This is held into the side of your recliner with two screws through the side of this, so usually they are just Philips head screws, you can just reach down in there, get those unscrewed and you’ll be good to go.
That’ll come loose and then you can sort of pull this loose. Well, if you notice, this is held into your mechanism right here, you can’t just pull it out. Well, how do you get that out? Usually if you’ve got some needle nose pliers you can take that out.
Take your channel locks and just grab it and pinch it in, and you can just pull it out from this side, but if you see that, this just sort of pops into this little rectangular hole here, and then once it goes far enough, it snaps into place, so if you can try to get it out from the side, but a lot of the times, it’s a lot easier to do it from the other side.
But once you do that, that just pulls right out.
You got that out of the way, well, how do you get this on and off, like I said, you may need a pair of pliers on the other side, there’s a small nut on the other side, let me show you that real quick.
Alright, this is the other side of it, and this is that nut I was talking about, so if you get a socket, I believe that’s a number 10 socket, but it may vary from mechanism to mechanism, so you could put a socket on there or pliers.
if you’re able to get some pliers in there, and that would be the nut that you need to hold as you use a Philip screwdriver on the other side to get it on and off.
Here’s the nut, make sure you hang on to all these parts, now, there’s a little spring right here, and that’s sort of what puts tension to this lever. it’s not a very strong spring, so you don’t have to use too much caution. It was hooked around the lever right here, and I just very gently pushed it around the side to relieve that tension, and then this just slides right out. Now there’s a couple of pieces here, and you just wanna be careful to keep those intact.
So let me break this down real quick and show you which parts there are and how it goes.
Let’s go ahead and take the spring out of here, you’ll see two holes in the mechanism frame right here, one of those is where your bolts gonna slide through, and then the other ones were you spring goes.
So let’s show you how this works, so you’ve got your bolt, your recliner lever, your bolt goes through your lever first, just like that, now you’ve got a little plastic bushing here. Basically, what you wanna make sure that slides into your lever, so that piece goes towards your lever, once you get that on, all you have to worry about is your spring.
What I like to do is I like to get the spring situated inside that hole first, and I know this is gonna be a lot more complicated with your mechanism inside the recliner, but this is doable. I’ve done it several times with it in-place, once that spring is in there, you just sort of pick that spring trying to do this where you can still see it, and you can slide this through it.
Bolt through, make sure this is facing down, that way, it sort of slides into the lever. Now we’re going to get that in the hole, and you want to to make sure you’ve got this positioned correctly so that when this is all the way back in. You need to make sure that it’s in a position where when this is pulled with the cable, that its going to push the mechanism down like this. Okay, so got that in place.
Now I want to get that spring on this back side of the lever again. It’s not a very powerful spring, so you can usually just do that by hand, where you put it around right here. And now you’ve got that tension, you notice I’m holding this bolt in here, otherwise this would probably pop out due to the tension. And then from there, just grab your nut and you can hand thread that on there to start it, just so it doesn’t pop off.
That’s one of the hardest things about these mechanisms, is working in really tiny spaces, and if it’s your first time, it’s just hard to figure out what’s going on sometimes, but the more you do it, the more familiar we come with.
Now you’ve got the tension on here because of the spring, and then you hook your cable back up to it.
Your cable clip will go into this rectangular notch in your frame, and I usually just go in that last hole right there. You can reinstall your Phillips screw on the back side of that clip again to hold it in there, and then once you pull your handle, you’ll notice that it’s activating the same.
Just to give it one test around here, close the mechanism up, you see that, and that’s where you want your levers right above this, and it’ll look different when you have your recliner flipped around, but see that when we pull the lever, it works perfectly.
That concludes our video for today on how to repair a manual recliner mechanism. There might be a couple of differences from mechanism to mechanism, but for the most part, that’s usually how the modern ones work.
Recliner Bitz
Thanks to 3:23 Concept for their informative video.
Recliner Bitz is based in Australia and we ship around the country. We offer excellent prices for a range of replacement recliner cables and levers and handles. Also check out our recliner brackets & clips and handles with cables.