Materials: Galant A-leg
Description: Having a couple of Galant style desks, with A type legs, I eventually ran into a problem that’s reported elsewhere: the leg cannot be “locked”. What happens is as follows:
1. One “unlocks” the leg by unscrewing it (anti or counter clockwise) to change the height.
2. The leg length is changed appropriately.
3. Attempting to lock the leg by screwing it clockwise results in it just turning and turning, and turning… And it doesn’t lock.
The chief culprit here is that the leg has been previously over-tightened. This aspect is most probably the least clear from the documentation, or the leg itself. How tight is enough? How tight is too tight? And no one wants a desk to fall down/over with a leg that is under-tightened.
(I can’t offer solid advice as to how tight is tight enough. However based on experience, once the leg grips, give it an extra twist – 1/4 – 1/2 rotation – by hand and that’s it. Don’t go further!)
So what to do when you have a “spinning leg”?
Step 1: Unscrew bottom part of leg, if necessary, and pull it out from the top part of the leg (Photo 1).
Photo 2 shows the two cones of the leg as it should be.
Photo 3 shows the two cones of the leg which suffers from this “spinning” problem. What’s happened is that the bottom cone has threaded itself onto the screw and so turning the leg results in the top part spinning as opposed to travelling down the thread. (To meet the bottom cone and then expand to lock the leg.)
Step 2: Grip the top of the threaded screw with pliers, but not the spring/washer structure, and unscrew the leg and bottom cone off the screw. You’ll know when to stop when the bottom part starts to spin on the screw because the thread only goes so far down the screw.
Photo 4 shows this done and it’s interesting to note that there’s a whole lot of plastic debris where the bottom cone has self-threaded itself onto the screw.
Step 3: Clear the debris with a knife or similar, see photo 5. Use super glue to lock the bottom cone to the screw, below the start of the thread. If necessary, also super glue the tabs of bottom part of the lower assembly of the bottom cone. (It’s not quite clear to me why this is free in the normal configuration – a manufacturing related design aspect(?) – but gluing everything results in a locked bottom part which is what you want.)
Step 4: With a knife, rough up both the surface of the bottom cone and the areas on the upper cone which contact the inside of the upper part of the leg. The whole leg works as a friction device and if the cones don’t grip – either to each other or to the inside of the upper part of the leg, then the leg won’t lock. (Indeed maybe this is a different type of spinning leg failure?)
I hope this helps!
Link:
autoresponse: colin.a.irwin@gmail.com
Name: Colin
Location: France
via IKEA Hackers http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Ikeahacker/~3/9jbvg0rcqdw/how-to-fix-galant-a-legs.html From Jules IKEAHacker
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