Office chair repair parts

[Beaker]

I've got a decent office chair at home with a couple of problems: one of the wheels is broken, and the padding is compressed to almost nothing from overuse. It seems like neither of these are particularly hard problems to solve, but I'm not sure where to get the parts. I've tried googling around, but "office chair parts" and similar searches aren't coming up with much. Anyone know where to find that sort of thing?

Also, I did find a couple of online tutorials, but if anyone has good links for instructions I'd be happy to have those too.

[geekette]

You're looking for casters, probably.  They're usually replaceable, but you need to find some that have the same fit.

As for the seat, I've never seen replacement seats, but you should be able to recover it.  Get foam from an upholstery supply shop and recover with the fabric of your choice and a good staple gun. 

[Thegoblinchief]

Take one of the good casters to a hardware store and you should be able to find a match.

You can fix the upholstery as mentioned above, or just buy some sort of add on chair cushion.

[Beaker]

I didn't think hardware stores would carry casters, but it's worth a look, thanks!

I've tried using add-on cushions on a previous chair and the result wasn't great. So I think I'll try replacing the padding this time and see if it's any better.

Thanks for the help.

[Russ]

office chair upholstery: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/how-to-reupholster-an-office-c-83201
basically it's as easy as unstapling some fabric, replacing the foam, and restapling the same way it was (or cutting a new piece of fabric to match the one you took off and stapling that on instead).

as far as the casters, if you have a part number (which would either be molded into the part itself or printed somewhere in the user's manual / assembly guide) you can pretty easily get an exact match just by searching the internet for "Part# caster" or something like that