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tensile strength of Ikea-style furniture
Tuesday, September 7 2010
Back in October of 2002 when we moved into this house, we naturally brought our computers from Gretchen's Brooklyn brownstone apartment with us. She had her one computer (an AMD K-6 running at 400 MHz), and I had my several computers (I had at least three working desktops even back then; the fastest was an Athlon running at 1.5 GHz). I eventually set up my computers upstairs in the laboratory and I set up Gretchen's computer down in her basement library, where she thought she'd be doing the majority of her computer work. She also had me set up a computer in the small room outside the kitchen on the first floor. This room came to be known as the "first floor office" and it ended up being the place where Gretchen does 99% of her computer-based work. But it was never really meant to be that way; the first floor office computer is set up not on a proper desk, but on our old Brooklyn dinner table. Thus the keyboard is a couple inches too high for ideal ergonomic comfort. In the past this hasn't been a big deal, but now that Gretchen has a sore back, she's decided she needs a better computing environment. So today I decided to swap the small dinner table in the first floor office with the big multi-level desk in Gretchen's library.
We'd bought that desk at Staples back in 2002 and had somehow managed to put it together despite the absence of instructions. It consists entirely of particleboard slabs veneered with plastic photographs of wood grain. These are held together with proprietary metal fasteners of the sort used by Ikea for their crappy assemble-it-yourself disposable furniture. Before heading off to work, Gretchen suggested I call a friend to have me help move the thing. But you know me; that's not how I roll.
Gretchen had also advised against taking it apart, since it had been so difficult to put together. But some minor disassembly seemed in order. I removed the top shelf, exposing the larger writing surface beneath as a single large plane I could use as a dragging surface when the desk was upside-down. Working from above the desk, I found I could drag it gradually upstairs from the basement one step at a time. There are an ominous 13 steps going from basement to first floor, and as I tried to pull the desk up that 13th step, the tension forces on those crappy proprietary fasteners exceeded a critical amount and the whole thing fell apart like the Hindenberg (or a brown paper bag, depending on your preferred metaphor). The pieces bounded down the stairs and tore a gash in the drywall.
But the disaster wasn't as bad as it initially looked. The drywall could easily be fixed, and so could the desk. It had broken into only three or four pieces, and the breakpoints had all happened at the proprietary fasteners. The fasteners themselves had all survived; I only had to straighten one in a vise. The greatest damage had happened to the holes in the particleboard where the fasteners had been attached. But with clamps, wood glue, and some sanding, I was able to restore those holes to their original condition well before Gretchen returned from work. It turns out that the fasteners I'd carefully extracted with tools (to temporarily remove that top shelf) had destroyed the particleboard into which they'd been attached nearly as much as the fasteners that had been rudely yanked out in the fall down the stairs. The simple process of inserted and retracting a threaded screw breaks away enough particleboard that subsequent fastenings with that fastener will fail. The only solution is to fill the hole with wood glue. This makes the hole behave more like one drilled into real wood, allowing screws to be repeatedly inserted and removed without causing the hole's threads to fail.
I had Gretchen's new workstation ready to go by the time she returned from work. She was astounded that I'd been able to do the job by myself. But, come on, I'm the guy who also built a subterranean greenhouse and a roof deck all by myself.
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