Friday, October 30, 2009

IKEA assembly cure: Lock dowels

I received a message on the blog a while ago from Bryan who has discovered the cure for IKEA assembly frustrations. (Refer to my previous posts about my frustrations: I Kan't Envision Assembly. As you might recall, I brought back the IKEA item–in its original box–and immediately went upstairs to enjoy some good IKEA Swedish meatballs. A much better experience.

Bryan writes that most people purchasing flat box furniture have frustrating moments. That was reassuring to me as I really did lose it, my wife tells me. Bryan has an answer to this common dilemma: "I've been working on a way to provide the easiest way to assemble furniture, and have succeeded. They're called lock dowels. All you have to do is push the pieces of wood together and your assembly is done. No tools required for assembly. Best of all, once snapped together, the hardware is invisible. Structural strength is also better because lock dowels can never come loose. To get a true visual go to No tools needed, no more complicated instructions. Let me know what you think."

Thanks, Bryan, it's a great idea. I did check out that site and it is amazing. I've got to give it a bit more analysis though to determine if drilling the holes and setting up the lock dowels and mechanisms will pass my skill and stress level thermometer. Of course, if IKEA decides to use Lock Dowels for assembly of their products, I'm returning there to give it one more try.  I hate to keep a good thing to myself so check out and let us all know what you think. Great ideas need to be shared. In the meantime, it's Swedish meatballs for me.


Anonymous said...

The idea is nice, but sometimes you need to dissemble the furniture. Also, with the wood dowels, you can use a dremel or proxxon rotary saw and cut the dowel and create custom ikea furniture like i did with the expedit (needed to put in my Denon receiver, but the shelves are only 15" width -- using the longer shelf and getting rid of the top smaller divider shelf, i was able to create one long 30" shelf. The dowel they gave was too long initially for this custom job (the dowel would intersect through the bottom 15" vertical smaller shelf and 30" longer horizontal shelf and then the top smaller vertical 15" shelf. By trimming down the dowel, I was able to remove the top vertical shelf and half a 30" shelf.

Anonymous said...

From my previous custom ikea expedit post here -- Here's an example of what someone else did (I did the left and right side) this person did the center.