Talk:Hydraulic tables and chairs design

This article is, once again, a nonsense. There are several problems:

• Cost. Hydraulics costs money. A dentist's chair has one short hydraulic ram for lift (Tilt is usually a leadscrew instead, although some US chairs use hydraulics here too, because of patient weight). Such chairs cost thousands and also requires occasional servicing. How does a table with multiple long rams end up as cheap furniture for people in tiny apartments?

• Space underfloor. Unlike the many mechanical linkages used for tables, hydraulic rams don't fold up. They require even more space under the floor than their height above it. This might be available in bungalows, but not in multi-storey apartments where height is even more costly than floor area. Multi-section telescopic rams reduce this height needed, but they still need substantial height and they add cost and complexity.

• A third problem is the simple difficulty of doing this with multiple rams. There are many long thin rams here, and any tilt will lead to jamming. Making this work without stiction would be near-impossible,

There have been many folding table in the past and no doubt more in the future. However they'll use cheap, compact linkages, not multiple hydraulic rams. Andy Dingley 13:20, 12 January 2012 (UTC)