I purchased a couple of bags of cam locks and their pillars intending to employ them in a bookcase unit I am about to build.
The shelves span 1.2Metres and books are heavy. The shelves and uprights are made of white coated chipboard. I am concerned that the eight may wrench the pillars out. I could glue 9mm dowels into the 18mm chipboard in turn drilling those pillars once the glue is set.
Much more work but might it be worth it?
What would you do?
TIA, Alan
Dados/rabetts and glue (and maybe a few sowels) - the joint will have similar strength to the "timber" without introducing stress points and distortion with mechanical fasteners,. Although I'd probably use plain MDF and paint it (or at least claim I was going to paint it at some point).
The load on the pillars is all in shear, so they will not pull out. About the only risk would be ripping the whole affair out through the top of the shelf - fairly unlikely unless you are climbing the shelves, and even then the tension on the pillar will help keep it together.
I weld up rectangular frames of dexion slotted 25mm RHS metal tube, use cut lengths of 12mm flat aluminium strip in the slots to hold the white coated chip board. The dexion rectangles sit on the floor and are attached to the wall with dynabolts or rawplugs.
The spacing of the dexion verticals is set to what doesnt see the shelves bend under the load.
Use that approach for the pantry shelves too.
Camlocks are only of use if you want to take stuff apart later on. They wobble like mad when they get flexed and also depend on the inner structure of the material they are made out of. Brian
Having assembled more Ikea Billy bookcases and other Ikea flat pack furniture than I care to count (!) I have found them to be a good, quick way of fastening two pieces of wood at right angles. Providing you screw the post in to the correct position, the cam locks the post very well, pulling the two pieces of wood together so they don't rock.
They do depend critically on the thread between the post and the piece of wood that it is screwed into. On the rare occasions that a cam lock joint has failed, it has always been the post that has pulled out of the wood, either leaving a clean hole that is too large or else ripping pieces off the board around the hole. That is in extreme cases - for example when we transported bookcases from one house to another in a van, something shifted and we found one bookcase had assumed a parallelogram shape as it got pushed sideways. Every cam post on one side had ripped from the chipboard. I imagine that solid wood would have fared a lot better than laminated chipboard.
I'd always wondered what the correct name for those fittings was. I tend to think of them as "Ikea fittings" in the absence of a better name. Now I know what to call them ;-)
In my experience melamine faced chipboard is likely to sag in the middle when a heavy load is placed near the middle of an unsupported span of
1.2m. If you are making your own bookcase than maybe secure them also at the back along their length.Also don't forget a back board. On flat pack furniture made of this stuff the often flimsy hardboard back holds the whole unit square. Without it the structure can become a parallelogram shape and all the fixings get put under strain and start failing.
I've recently destroyed a very heavy old bookcase made of decent chipboard rather than modern compressed weetabix and once the back was removed it was relatively easy to push the sides away from vertical and break the fixings.
I agree. It was only when we instaled two 1-Metre IKEA wardrobes that I experienced CAM fittings for the first time. That is is why I chose to use them but I have since decided to glue dowels into the boards and then drill them to take the CAM pillars.
The backs I am using are 5mm ply. Not good enough to take any strain. I will have to add pieces between the shelves in the form of a column.
Thanks for helping to make up my mind.
Alan
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