It’s amazing how many bad ideas become everyday products creating tens of millions of pissed off people. First we had the bed frame connecting rail which had a slot and came with a cairraige head bolt and a wing nut so the manufacturer could claim “no tools required” assembly. Anyone who ever slept for any length of time on a bed which had that wing nut finger tight knows how well that works out. At least a blue collar working man could solve that problem. Throw the wing nut away. Get a big flat washer, proper sized lock washer with proper sized nut and tighten with ratchet. End of problem.
Then came the DNA which needs to be purged from the global gene pool, the DNA which gave us the key slot connector. A couple of stub rails with rivets come off the main outer rails. then you have this piece of angle iron with key slots cut into it where you are suppose to magically guess which four to use. Twin, Swedish, Full, Queen and King. One connector bar makes that pair of frame rails work with any sized mattress. God forbid they actually mark the holes to use.
Adding insult to injury you have to assemble these beds from the center out. The headboard and foot board, if they exist, must be put on last. This is in stark contrast to the long slot cut connection which couldn’t care less. It’s also not the way people think. When you have a headboard or foot board which won’t stand on its own the first thing you want to do is attached the outer rails so you don’t have to worry about it falling over and hitting you.
Yes, I moved into a new corporate housing unit and the first night sleeping on the bed nearly ruined my back. I was too tired to care. I laid down on the bed and it felt like my ass went to the floor. Woke up the next morning hurting in more places than I knew I had. Thankfully this is a two bedroom unit so I tested out the bed in the second bedroom. It felt fine.
The lesser of two evils was to just swap the mattress and foundation between each bed. Not much less, but less. A cheap mattress weighs a ton and doesn’t have any handles. I was sweating through everything I had on when I got them out of the second bedroom and staged them in the master. Then I had to pop the master set off. When that was done I saw the problem. The top cross support was in pieces on the floor. As you can see by the image someone did the college kid “fix” to the bottom cross support. The rivets were barely catching and the thing was locked in place by a thick wrap of packing tape.
I made another trip out in the rain to get Gorilla tape and then started taking enough of the bed apart to connect the key slots properly. When I had the cross supports connected properly I locked them in place with Gorilla tape. Sorry about the quality of the pic, but the lighting was just bright enough to make auto flash not work.
