wooden dowel pins in beds: consumer safety

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For a start, I wanted to title this topic: Can you spread a consumer safety message against wooden "dowel" pins in beds, before the topic slips down out of sight? Can't have a topic title that long.

This message is not country specific, it's about a design trend, so it could happen anywhere.

I'm getting a new bed sent back as faulty goods. A part called a "DOWEL" snapped during putting the bed together, within 2 hours of its delivery, leaving it unusable before I had ever lain on it. It's a shockingly flimsy pin of wood a few cm long. It has no head end, there was no way to see it before buying the bed because both ends go into a hole so it is totally covered and hidden in the assembled joint. This also means it is the part that goes in first, and carries weight first, when you fit the joint together. It failed to carry the weight of one corner even before it had a whole bed frame's weight attached to it, let alone before it had yet carried the weight of a person's body.

Searching on dowels, I found stories of other furniture joints being left unusable too soon by their snapping, and a child's bunk bed steps breaking dangerously. They are obviously such a bad idea it's not common sense to have them in a bed's design. I asked the supplier head on for grounds how could take the responsibility of saying otherwise, when knowing this one had snapped - they couldn't.

When I phoned them as soon as it happened, they were going to deliver a new dowel, and with it a whole new bedhead, because the bedhead they had just delivered was now unusable with half of this broken dowel jammed in the hole! I wrote to them saying, as this part has broken once how can you possibly take the responsibility to guarantee it won't break again, and in that case there is a danger of injury, how can the bed possibly be safe to use even with the part replaced? And making the case that it was in their interest not to fight against taking the bed back, how expensive will it be for them to have to deliver major new parts to me under the guarantee, who knows how many times, every time one of these silly little pins snaps? My cooperation is promised if they want to claim back from the maker for withdrawing it as a bad product.

Please pass this on, see how far a piece of common sense consumer safety can be shared around. Forewarn, that when buying beds or other weight carrying furniture, make sure they don't fit together with dowels.

They should start using steel pegs for wooden beds. It doesn't seem like common sense to put wooden pegs into the boxes. You think they would have thought of that years ago.

Dowel joints have been in use for hundreds (maybe thousands) of years and when done right they aren't a problem, after all, some boats are held together using dowel joints and that's a bit more critical than your bed!

However, it needs to be done RIGHT. Wood glue** needs to be on both ends of the dowel before you slip it into the hole and then you need to wait until the joint has set before putting it under load. The wood glue makes the dowel expand and grip the hole so tight that you should need tools to pull a joint apart.

** Note: ONLY wood glue should be used here, not epoxy or crazy glue.