On 17 Aug, 23:45, Derek Geldard wrote:
My son sleeps on a Muji double bed about 5 years old.

Recently my wife bought him a "feather bed" which sits on top of the
usual mattress and adds considerably to it's weight. This has caused
some of the wooden members of the construction to break, and I set out
to fashion a repair.

To my horror I found that these wooden parts which are about *200 cm
x 3 cm x 2cm have been fabricated out of short lengths of rubber wood
around 20 x 3 x 2 which have been joined together by being machined on
the ends into a male and female tapered comb, and then glued to form a
single piece of material which can be used as virgin timber.

To all intents and purposes all the glued joints have failed as the
structure progressively deflected, about 50 of them, and a repair is
more or less impossible.

Just something to watch out for when buying commercial furniture
nowadays.

It's good to be able to buy a bed or a table built at Vietnamese wage
rates but less good if it's prone to collapse without warning into a
pile of sixty or seventy bits of flotsam if overloaded by a few kilos.

8-((((

Derek

One thing I hadn't realised until recently with rubber wood is that it
is near enough the ultimate in recycling as the rubber trees have a
finite life cycle producing latex and previously were presumably burnt
when their productivity fell off. So the material for our beds etc is
effectively a by-product.

It does sound in this case that there was a weakness in the original
bed design or in the manufacture of the composite panels as in general
this construction technique is pretty reliable.

Rob