Can Portable Chairs Really Hold 300lb? We Put Them to the Test

However, portability and sitting appear to require materials that possess conflicting properties. Portable things must be lightweight, compact, and easy to carry, whereas the number one most important trait of a chair can be summarized as “sturdiness.”

This begs the question, how strong can portable chairs actually be? They don’t look or feel especially sturdy, with their hollow frames and thin fabric. Can you really trust one to safely support you throughout the duration of your beach day/family reunion/campfire s’mores operation?

Being the concerned citizens we are, we decided to test our own portable chairs to find out how much weight they can hold. You might want to sit down for this.

How We Did It (aka The Method)

We asked ourselves, what’s heavy yet relatively contained and therefore easy to move from chair to chair? The answer we came up with was 50lb sandbags – 10 of them. Post-experiment, it’s fair to say that we may have misdiagnosed the “easy to move” part.

We also used two 45lb free weights we had to hand.

Occasionally, we added other items and offspring we found in our testing environment/garage. (No children were physically or emotionally harmed in the process of this experiment. We can’t say the same for the grown men moving the sandbags.)

As the mathematically gifted among you will have already concluded, that gave us a total weight of 590lb, plus a little more if needed. Most of the chairs came with a manufacturer-recommended weight limit of 300lb to 325lb. The two small stools are recommended for no more than 250lb. Given this, we were pretty sure that none of them would make it anywhere close to 500lb, much less 590lb.

We tested the chairs one at a time, piling the free weights, sandbags, and miscellaneous extras on top of each one, and waiting for signs of failure. If none was evident, we declared the chair a survivor.

Now for the bit you’ve been waiting for: The video of chairs getting pushed to literal breaking point.

What Happened (aka The Results)

Against all expectations, four of the 12 chairs we tested survived 590lb+. By which we mean, after a few minutes holding that weight, they weren’t showing obvious signs of buckling.

Looking at the eight that broke, an obvious weak point became clear. Going into it, we’d assumed the fabric would rip first. However, that proved untrue in all but one case (we’ll get to that later.)

A Hole Thing

All the chairs have crisscrossing legs on the front, back, and sides. That crisscross point (to use the technical term) is connected with a screw. This screw turned out to be the weak point – or more specifically, the hole the screw was screwed through was the weak point. Which makes sense: The rest of the leg is a metal tube, so that hole is the most likely place for the metal to give out.

In all but one case, the chair gave way because the legs snapped around that hole. Some snapped on the front, on one side, or both sides.

Material Matters

The fabric ripped on four of the 12 chairs, typically around the hole the metal legs come up through. However, in all but one instance the tearing didn’t cause the failure, because the metal legs gave way first.

The fabric on these chairs might look lightweight but it’s tough. In most cases, the fabric was 600 denier (D) polyester, 600D polyester blend, or 600D nylon.

Anyone who has bought tights or tents may recognize the French word denier. (That’s “de-knee-air,” as opposed to the English word “den-eye-er,” as in “someone who denies something.”) Denier is a unit for measuring the thickness of fabric. (Or, more accurately, the thickness of the strands that make up a fabric.) Turns out 600D is extremely capable – it’s the favored thickness in many outdoor products.

The Special Case

Now we come to that one exceptional case: The chair that failed because of its fabric, not its legs.

Technically, it’s a stool, not a chair. (Aren’t all stools chairs, but not all chairs are stools? That’s getting way too philosophical.) Anyway, it was shaped like an X, with a fabric rectangle connecting the X at the top and forming the seat. Unlike the fabric used in the other contenders, the fabric in this stool was only 210D polyester.

As we loaded the weights, the legs were forced down, tugging on the fabric until it ripped at around 490lb. Which is still more weight than the 250lb it’s technically recommended for, so let’s not be too dismissive. You can see in the photos that the screw is still in place and the legs are still intact.

What We Learned (aka The Conclusion)

A chair can, in fact, be both portable and sturdy! Even the eight chairs that broke did so at a higher weight than the limit recommended by the manufacturer – higher than 590lb, in some cases.

If you are worried about a chair collapsing, pay attention to the screws that connect the crisscrossing legs in the front and sides. If it’s going to break, it’s most likely going to break around those holes first.

Reality check

Say you wanted to be that person and point out a major flaw in our experiment. First of all, harsh, but OK, we can accept constructive criticism. Second of all, it would probably be that we didn’t let the weight sit on the chairs for more than a few minutes.

When we saw that a chair was about to fail, we waited around 30 seconds to a minute, and then loaded on more weight, in the name of hurrying the inevitable. If we’d waited longer, some of the chairs would likely have failed at a lower weight. Some of our survivors would probably have eventually cracked too.

Another factor to bear in mind is that these are brand new chairs. We don’t know how many times you can put 590lb+ or even 300lb on a chair without it breaking – especially if that chair is often used outdoors or stored in less-than-ideal conditions, like in the heat, cold, or damp.

The Bottom Line

What we’re saying is, don’t translate our results as, “I can pile 590lb onto this camping chair that I’ve had since college and it won’t break, my praises upon the ingeniousness of modern manufacturing!” But it’s a load off your mind when you take a load off.

Q#	Product Name	Image	Manufacturer’s Weight Limit	Material	Result	View Product
Q1180	Captain’s Chair	Watch Clip	300lb	Steel frame, 600D polyester	Broke at 590lb	View Product
Q4214	KOOZIE® Chair Cooler	Watch Clip	250lb	210D polyester and tubular steel	Broke at 490lb	View Product
Q23083	Folding Chair	Watch Clip	300lb	Steel frame, 600D polyester	Broke at 590lb	View Product
Q71534	Folding Captain’s Chair	Watch Clip	300lb	Steel frame, 600D polyester	Broke at 540lb	View Product
Q67445	KOOZIE® Camp Chair	Watch Clip	300lb	Steel frame, 600D polyester	Survived 590lb	View Product
Q56203	Fanatic Event Folding Chair	Watch Clip	300lb	PVC-backed 600D polyester	Broke at 640lb	View Product
Q36184	Game Day Event Chair	Watch Clip	300lb	600D polyester canvas	Broke at 667lb	View Product
Q23089	Mesh Folding Chair	Watch Clip	300lb	Steel frame, 600D nylon	Broke at 590lb	View Product
Q64597	Coleman Oversized Cooler Quad Chair	Watch Clip	325lb	Poly-oxford with a PEVA-lined cooler	Survived 667lb	View Product
Q83503	Premium Heather Stripe Chairs	Watch Clip	300lb	Steel frame, 600D polyester	Survived 590lb	View Product
Q66188	Two-Tone Captain’s Chair	Watch Clip	300lb	600D polyester	Survived 590lb	View Product
Q40911	Cooler Bag Chair	Watch Clip ✖	250lb	600D polyester seat, 420D polyester backpack	Broke at 440lb	View Product