My daughter Stefanie works at a beauty salon and has her own room for massages, beauty treatments, etc. But the headrest that came with her table wasn't designed very well and was really uncomfortable. So she asked me if I could help her make something else. I was happy to work on this project and gladly accepted.
 

One thing I wanted to keep was the pins that were on the old headrest because they worked with her table. So I plan on cutting these off and reusing them but tossing the rest out.
 

Stef also gave me this headrest, which was made for a completely different table. But she wondered if I could somehow use it because she had the cushion that goes on this one. And this cushion was in good condition. One thing unique with this headrest is the ability to fold down out of the way with the use of that small lever. This was a must for her because the room she's in is very small. So maybe if I could somehow adapt the old pins to this unit that would be ideal.

After looking at this one for awhile, it had some nice features but it also had a lot of plastic pieces which is very hard to work with if you want it to end up being strong and work correctly. After thinking about it a little longer, I decided to keep only one piece of this headrest.
 

I'm only going to keep the plastic frame that the cushion attaches to so I drilled out the rivets and removed everything from it.
 

I had some angle iron that came from an old bed frame laying around and it has a wall thickness slightly less that 1/8" that should work great for this project. I cut off two pieces with my metal cutting saw.
 

I used three toe clamps and started tightening them down until I had my angle iron squashed pretty good. But this material wasn't bending like I wanted and I found out later that it had some kind of heat treat to it. Now I had to scratch my head at this because heat treated bed frames was new to me. But after a few times back and forth with the clamps and doing some measuring, I had both bent like I wanted them.