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Comment by michaelhoffman | Hacker News Reader

Given how many Lack tables I've seen fall apart without any sort of load, I would be very reluctant to try this, no matter how many people report it works for them. It's IKEA's cheapest table for a reason.

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In my experience, even cheap IKEA stuff is pretty solid and well worth the cost as long as you treat it with care. Some stuff is garbage even if you're careful but I've never personally seen something from IKEA that isn't great if handled gently.

On trick is to add some glue when you are assembling the furniture.

the lack I used for my prusa was , over time, covered in printed gusset features and additional L-brackets to get rid of sway and movement within the table itself.

it looked god-awful but it was sturdy for years and years of production-quantity printing. It was only disassembled when the print lab got rebuilt.

so, in other words, I support your idea of modifying the construction of the lack wholeheartedly. The joint lines are one of the only 'strong-ish' elements on the entire table, and I think they'd take glue nicely.

The IVAR system is, in my book, absolute complete junk. I couldn't get it to even attempt to work correctly, it wobbled when it wasn't collapsing, and to make insult even worse, it was more expensive than actual industrial wire shelving.

Did you forget to add cross-braces [0]? Ivar has always been rock-solid for me.

[0] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/observatoer-cross-brace-galvani...

Even with cross bracing it had too much wobble, which would pull the short pins out of the cross board, and if you bumped a shelf it would hop out and then fall.

That sounds like you didn’t properly clip the shelves on (it takes a bit of force). In any case, that’s not how Ivars usually behave.

Yeah despite my complaints about LACK above I have had only good experiences with the IVAR stuff, made out of real wood.

In my experience, you get one move from IKEA furniture. By the time you've relocated it twice, whether across the room or across the country, it will become unstable and likely to fail.

If you are exceptionally careful and always have help moving anything of size, you may do better.

My dad was a cabinit maker so i have experienced "proper" cabinets as well as Ikea stuff.

You called it. Ikea furniture never seems to support disassembly / reassembly.

I've thrown out several sets of Ikea dressers and such which lasted ~5 years while the stuff my dad built is still in perfect working condition 22 years later.

As far as the Ikea rack idea is concerned, holding any sort of weight has always been the major failure with Ikea furniture. They sell bookshelves which cant hold books... Dressers with 1/4 "cardboard" bottoms which cant support the weight of clothing.

you get what you pay for.

My oldest Ikea unit is from 2007, it's moved 5 times since then, as solid now as the day I bought it, although that one is small enough to not have to dismantle.

I've got an ikea bed dismantled, moved, rebuilt 3 times no problem, and a bookcase with the same dismantle/rebuild process 4 times. My office desk is also on 4 moves over 10 years.

you can't really generalize that IMHO, they make both things that are easily damaged and stuff that can easily survive many moves.

I currently have two stacked Lacks acting as a cheap homemade server rack. I have 2x 4U ontop the bottom table (not floating as they're doing in the article), with an older colour laser printer and 21" monitor, KVM, etc. on the top table. Underneath I have 2x1500VA UPSes.

It's been that way for years and I've moved it a few times. I think if you've seen them fall apart without any load, they're either the much newer ones that have been completely hollowed out, or they've been used in a rougher setting than "servers sitting statically on them for years."

I know quite a few home lab users who swear by them. One person I know even has a full triple stack (which seems unsafe to me personally) with his networking gear on top of the servers.

They don't hold up well to repeated side impacts or horizontal shearing. So kids jumping on it, shin kicks, or moving locations. They do well with the vertical forces if they're rarely moved.

Why? Do the legs shatter? That would be the only reason that your concern makes sense - adding 1 or more rigid metal bodies that connect to each leg seems like it would stabilize the structure.

Some years ago the legs used to be fully solid, now most of the legs are empty. So what you can do is get some wood sticks cut to the same size of the inside of the legs.

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