Best IKEA Dining Tables

Assembly nightmare - poorly designed instructions and hardware – I bought the Ekedalen table and 6 chairs. I had it professionally assembled via Ikea. It took the assemblers about 10 hours to complete the job.… Read more

Really. I am pretty happy with the table; it's durable and quite scratch proof- suitable for children. However, a bit over a year after we bought the set, one of the chairs developed a crack in the leg and started coming apart at the join. I contacted Ikea who agreed to send a replacement. I tried to assemble the new chair (Ikea did not offer to supply an assembler even though we originally paid for that) and accidentally screwed a bolt right through the front of the chair. I think the instructions and design were pretty poor - no warning at all that it was even possible to do that. I shouldn't need an engineering degree to understand the instructions. The problem seems to be the cylindrical piece that anchors the bolt (see photos). You can screw the bolt into the piece, but you can also screw it out the other side. There's no reason for that piece to be open on the other side. That would have prevented me screwing it too far. With the benefit of hindsight, there is a symbol in the manual that has a spiral diagram and numbers 1 and 2 (pictured) but I had no idea that that was meant to mean only turn the bolt twice. Not even the people at Ikea could decode that instruction. I then had to take the chair back to Ikea to ask them to replace the broken piece. They did not want to do that. They claimed it was my fault and I showed them the page in the manual and ask them to explain how I could possibly understand their language-free instructions. We spoke to two people at Ikea who repeatedly said they didn't have a replacement part in stock. I said I expected them just to replace the whole chair. When I said I thought the cylindrical anchor piece was poorly designed because you can screw the bolt right through it and it should not be open at both sides, the Ikea person said it was like that because they use that piece in lots of furniture and sometimes you are meant to screw the bolt right through it. So the part is poorly designed because it's cheaper for Ikea to produce it that way. Only when I asked to speak to the store manager did they produce the replacement part in about 20 seconds - having apparently lied about having it repeatedly. Appalling customer service. I also recalled the assembler mentioning that he had assembled replacement tables for a number of customers who had screwed a bolt right through the top of the table. It's likely a similar design problem. Having got the replacement piece, it took me 40 minutes to assemble the chair. It's pretty horrible to assemble with no space to turn the Allen key, so you do frustrating little quarter turns then spend 20 seconds trying to re-attach the key. I would probably get better with practice and I did have a little person helping but allow about 30 minutes per chair if you just use the supplied tools.