Torque of The Town

Pictured, the results of the much-needed re-engineering of the cheap-as-chips fireside log rack we bought just after we installed the wood-stove. You can just see the pair of M8-threaded studs I made to pull the thing together, through the original tubing that forms the links between the two frames. The other two pairs of tubes now effectively act as mere spacers, whereas in the original construction, the six were meant to hold the whole thing together: there were crappy push-in plastic plugs with a nut pushed into them, which were stuffed into the open ends of the tubes. These took little hex-bolts which went through the holes in the outside of the frames, which in themselves are of a perfectly decent construction.

The end-result was obviously always going to be rubbish; as when you tightened up the hex-bolts, the natural tendency was for the crappy plastic plugs to be pulled from the tubes. Worse still, some of the nuts simply came away from said crappy plastic plugs. Garbage. So I drilled out the holes to take the M8 studs, and in doing so realised I really only needed two, rather than six, as the torque applied to the nuts in the new arrangement put all six into compression anyway. I added some battens to the piece of gash chipboard laminate I'd been using as a floor for the thing, and job done. To be honest, it would have been cheaper to have manufactured it this way in the first place, and easier to assemble: a totally numb-nuts piece of design made good by the application of first principles. Yet another throwaway product rescued...