I just realized that the title of this article doesn’t sound so good, but the info is pretty dang good, if I do say so myself. One of the things I get asked a lot about massage chairs is what kind of maintenance needs to go into keeping a new chair in great running order. Surprisingly, not much. I wrote an article some time ago about upkeep of a massage chair and you can read it here…

https://www.massage-chair-relief.com/blog/general/how-to-keep-your-new-chair-healthy-and-happy/

In that article I mention that you don’t need to do any inner maintenance of the chair, i.e. lube jobs, like you have to do with a car. However, there are times when certain parts of a chair can squeak and in that particular case you may need to a little “greasing.”

This happens very rarely, but we’ve seen it enough that I thought it would be a good topic of discussion. Every chair is different and has different “greasing points”, but there are some similarities. I am going to give you the instructions that were given to us by Infinite Therapeutics when we had a local IT-8500 that had begun to squeak. This is a pretty good guideline for most chairs.

We used white lithium grease, which can be purchased from Home Depot or Lowes, certain “pivot points” of the chair. It is the pivot points that may vary from model to model, but they all have them. Lithium grease can be purchased either as a spray or cream and both have pros and cons. The spray can penetrate deeper into the pivot points but over-spray may get on the upholstery and compromise it. The cream doesn’t have the initial permeation of the area like a spray, but if too much is put on, clumps of it can fall on the upholstery and compromise it as well.

My son, Rob, does all of our local repairs and he says that it is very easy to grease the pivot points. I would suggest that if you have squeaking coming from any part of your massage chair, call the manufacturer first and find out what they suggest. If it needs greasing, they will send you pivot point locations and instructions. Here is an example of what the pivot points are in the Infinity IT-8500:

1.the back of the recliner (for zero gravity, footrest, backrest lifting)
2.the pin roll of the recliner and the connection for the recliner hangers
3.the connection between the backrest and seat stand
4.the footrest recliner pushing rollers and spout
5.the connection between the footrest and seat stand

Pretty simple stuff, eh?

Dr. Alan Weidner