Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My wife and I have considered a massage chair for our home for ten years now but could never bring ourselves to spending thousands of dollars for one sight unseen in case it didn't fit our body size. I'm 5'9" and she is 5'2". Both of us are medium build with a little "fluff". She enjoys deep tissue massages and I enjoy them less intense. Her birthday and Mother's Day are coming up so I decided I'd look into a chair again but this time on Amazon, not my local Costco. After searching 'Massage Chairs" this chair kept coming up as the best bang for your buck with the best reviews. I think I read through every review and looked at every photo in order to make my own best decision. I slept on it for a few days and decided to pull the trigger. Here is my honest review. The chair was delivered via FedEx on one of their regular trucks (UPS Style box truck), it was in two boxes, the side walls in one smaller pretty light weight box and the main chair in the second one which was VERY heavy. The heavy box with the chair in it was fairly damaged with a couple of holes punched into the side of it but upon further inspection, we found that no damage had occurred to the chair. I had it delivered to my work (so I could surprise my wife later) and it took two guys to load it into the bed of my pick-up truck. I made sure to take a hand truck home with me in order to get it into the house. When I arrived home, I brought my wife out and showed her what I had bought for her and she told me to send it back, it was too much (thinking I must have spent thousands on it); however, when I told her the price she quickly reconsidered and then couldn't wait to get it into the house and set up. Fortunately I had the hand truck so was able to get it into the living room (it's home) fairly easily. I used a box cutter to cut the tape on the top flaps of the box and then opened the lid, I was greeted with a thin sheet of pliable wood, almost like balsa wood but a bit heavier. I pulled that out and set it aside. Then there were four folded over pieces of cardboard on each corner to protect the corners, two of them pulled right out but the other two were stuck so I left them in place for now. The chair back is attached to the base but it comes folded down, forward onto the seat. It was at this point I didn't know how I was going to get this thing out of the box. There are no instructions to explain this but I tried to use my past experience with items like this. I noticed the base of the box was a separate piece so it appeared that the upper main walls and lid flaps were meant to separate from the base and pull up and off, but I could not figure out for the life of me how to do this. I cut the tape connecting the top to the bottom but this did nothing. I finally decided to just go ahead and cut down all four corners to allow the sides to fall open. This was successful and it allowed me to remove the other two corner protectors and then slide the chair out onto the floor. The chair came with a type of plastic bag over it and was easy to remove. I then opened the second box and pulled out the two side wall pieces and removed them from their bags. After moving all the cardboard stuff to the side I was ready to tackle assembly. I slid the chair near its final resting place and found and opened the small box containing the instruction manual, two wheels, 4 hex bolts, hex wrench and power cord. I then inspected the chair, remote and side walls for any damage, everything was fine except one of the brackets that the wheels attach to were partially pinched shut preventing the wheel from fitting between the two brackets for install. This is hard metal with no signs of something causing the damage and no paint missing or scratches so it must have occurred during the manufacturing process before it was even painted? Fortunately this was nothing a hammer and some light, careful tapping couldn't fix. I proceeded to insert the plastic wheels and a hex bolt in each one securing them in place. Next, I unfolded the chair back to its upright position and it clicked into a latching mechanism to hold it in place. Next I brought over the side walls and set leaned them against each side of the chair. This allowed me to attach 3 color coded air hoses to each other and a wire connector. This is done to both sides the same. I then attached the side walls to the chair using a peg slot on the top and the bottom just rests on the outer frame of the base of the chair, super easy. Next I came around to the front of the chair and lifted up the seat and back padding in order to connect another wire plug. At this point I also inserted a hex bolt into each of the side walls to hold them in place. After this I laid everything back down and this completed the chair assembly process. Recap - attach wheels, connect 6 color coded hoses, connect 3 wires by their snap together connectors, attach sidewalls and then plug it in. Not too bad at all. The corded remote has a hardened plastic shrink wrap covering it to help protect it during transport as it is freely bouncing around in the box during transport. I removed the plastic and powered it on. Here are each of our experiences in the chair. My wife is 5' 2" with a short torso. The upper neck/shoulder rollers are right at the back of her head, not neck at all. She has to place a small flat pillow over these to avoid pain these were causing her head. Next down her back are rollers at her lower back and then another set at her tailbone area. Theses are connected to each other and are on a hinge so the two sets can teeter totter depending on how you lay against them, i.e. more pressure against the upper rollers the bottom really digs into your tail bone area and vice versa. The bottom rollers ended up causing a lot of pain like bruising so we moved the Velcro attached head rest pad down to cover the lower back rollers. This helped tremendously. The shoulder, hip, arm, calf airbags all worked properly and yes, the calf airbags can be intense but deflate rather quickly only applying pressure for a couple of seconds at a time. The hip and shoulder bags did not do much for either of us, they inflate but don't really put much pressure on either of us like the calf and arm bags do. The heat feature was felt in the calf area but not so much in the lower back area. It works but just not as hot. All the rollers are fixed and can be turned off and on in manual mode and rotation speed can be adjusted. There are no other roller ball adjustments available for this price range of chair. When I sat in the chair, the neck rollers sat properly at the base of my neck; however, they don't 'dig' in enough for my taste. I even tried removing the headrest cushion, it helped but still not enough pressure. Everything lined up just fine otherwise but those lower tailbone rollers were way to intense. It was causing such pain that I moved the pad down to cover them and that seemed to help a little. I cannot put the chair in zero G position as the weight of my body put too much pressure on those lower rollers...ouch. You may have noticed I haven't mentioned the foot rollers. Well, these did not work (at first). We tried everything we could to troubleshoot this problem and then at one point they came on for about 30 seconds during a session with my wife and then they died. Everything else was working fine so we figured it couldn't be the one fuse this unit has so it must be a disconnected wire or short somewhere. I'm pretty good at tinkering so I decided to poke around a little without voiding any kind of warranty of course and I would not recommend what I am about to explain to folks to anyone. I powered up the chair without anyone on it and put it into the zero G position so I could access the under side of the front of the chair. I had it running so I could find the short. I removed the access panel from the front of the chair. There are 6 little screws and was easy to do. With this removed you can see the wires and hoses coming in from the foot rest. I identified the power wire from the footrest and found were it clipped together with the main wire from the base. It was connected already but disconnected and reconnected it to see if this changed anything, nope the rollers still didn't work. I then took the hose/wire bundle and moved it around to see if there was short and low and behold the rollers would go on and off intermittently depending on how I moved the bundle. I then followed the wires down to a small cut out in the main power unit housing where the wires came together and entered the housing. I noticed that the opening was slightly too small and one wire was pinched under the housing edge. When I tried to free this one wire the rollers would turn off and on. Found the problem. To fix this I took a pair of needle nose pliers and broke of a very small piece of plastic at that hole to make the hole big enough to un-pinch that wire. With that done, the rollers have worked flawlessly. I reattached the access panel and the chair is working perfectly. I did notify customer service about the roller issue before I figured it out and they got back to me this morning with a very nice and informative response asking me to double check the connector behind the access panel as it may have come lose during transport and if this wasn't the problem to please let them now so we could do something else to try and fix the problem. Bottom line, this is a great chair. The issues (other than the pinched wire) are more due to our body type and size, not the chair. We are able to adjust ours and the chairs tilt position and add pillows to make the massage experience more comfortable. This experience will help us when choosing a more expensive chair in the near future that will auto adjust to our body type. I would recommend this chair to anyone who wants to get into one of these as inexpensively as possible. If you want a chair that adjusts then I would recommend one with the rollers that slide up and down your back, not fixed rollers like this chair has. I hope this helps with your decision making!