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BAYER PLASTICS' MAKROLON® POLYCARBONATE ENHANCED THROUGH FANTASIA'S™ LEDA™ TECHNOLOGY, GIVES STYLE AND STRENGTH TO CAFÉ CHAIRS
The café Pocket Chair was a winner of the 2001 Good DesignTM Award from the Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design. The café Pocket Chair, with applications in both the commercial and residential markets, is 33 inches tall, 19 inches deep and 18 inches wide. The base is made of chrome-plated steel and the shell is made from Makrolon polycarbonate. When In House Furniture began looking for a material for its Pocket Chair, it wanted a material that is not commonly used in furniture - one that was durable and could be transparent, translucent, or opaque. 'Bayer's Makrolon polycarbonate had many of the properties we were looking for and gave us more freedom as designers to really explore new ideas,' said Monty Lawton, co-owner and designer, In House Furniture. In House Furniture used Leda technology - one of five technologies available as part of Bayer Plastics' Fantasia colors and special effects marketing initiative - to color the Makrolon resin. In House currently offers the chairs in four colors - translucent white, transparent blue and red, and clear. Additional colors are available upon request. Lawton, and co-owner and designer Mark Zuckerman, agreed that the injection-molded chair was very challenging to produce. 'In order to form the chair as a single piece, without having multiple parts that had to fit together, there had to be movable molded parts within the main mold to create the pocket and the leg attachment points,' Zuckerman said. After the plastic is injected into the mold and solidified, the chair shell is removed. In order for the shell to be removed successfully, all five movable molded parts within the main mold must slide out of the way. 'That part of the process was really something that had never been done. But thanks to Bayer's Makrolon polycarbonate and Leda technology we were able to produce the chair exactly the way we envisioned,' Lawton said. Introduced to the market in September 2002, Fantasia is the industry's most complete, one-stop solution for color and special effects. Along with Leda, Fantasia also includes the following technologies for adding visual and tactile effects to engineering thermoplastics: AuraTM - A proprietary color infusion technology. Fantasia's broad range of color and special effects are designed to give a unique look and feel to the product. The look depends on the interaction of light with the product's shape. To most effectively illustrate this, Bayer has designed a marketing tool for customers that include a wide range of three-dimensional 'spoons' to showcase many of the see-and-feel effects and the capabilities of each of the five technologies. http://www.bayermaterialscience.com
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