OT: My blood pressure and Danish engineers.

Whistle
1

Or, better title: OT: Tvilum-Scanbirk & the Land of Legal Narcotics

Ok, so, Marilyn and I just bought a very attractive bookshelf with glass doors from Organized Living. Manufactured in Denmark by a company called T v i l u m-Scanbirk. As they say on their website:

Koncernen udvikler, producerer og sælger et stort sortiment af plademøbler baseret på spån- eller MDF-plader, der er beklædt med folie, melamin eller finer.

Well, you’re damn right. Never mind that this text reminds me of NOTHING other than the opening credits of MONTY PYTHON AND THE FREAKIN’ HOLY GRAIL.

This is the kind of bookshelf/cabinet many of you are already familiar with. You see it in the store. It looks good. The price is right. You buy it and they load it into your geriatric Dodge Caravan in dishearteningly FLAT, nearly 2-dimensional boxes. That’s right. “Some assembly required.” Never mind that you open the boxes and discover bags and bags of loose parts, unlabeled panels—and then you discover that NO TWO PARTS ARE ALREADY ASSEMBLED and you think, “Hmmm, no-o-o-, ‘some assembly’ is not accurate. TOTAL AND COMPLETE ASSEMBLY IS REQUIRED.”

No problem, I have built MANY pre-fab bookshelves and cabinets from fine American companies like Sauder. They aren’t located in Denmark, where there are legal narcotics and hallucinogens freely available to Tvilium-Scanbirk’s engineers, designers, and technical writers. But, I digress.

SO, the nice people at Tveililrum-Scanbyork, or whatever, are SENSITIVE to the fact that they sell products to unsuspecting Americans who, for the most part, DON’T SPEAK DANISH. So, they don’t want to confuse us, so they include assembly instructions that include NO TEXT WHATSOEVER. NONE. Not English, not Danish, not Chhattisgarhi. No text at all. So, no problem, right? Since they are unwilling to part with the Danish Pesos (or Euros, or whatever) to pay one of the MANY PEOPLE IN DENMARK WHO SPEAK ENGLISH to write English instructions—all they have to do, right, is include really good diagrams and drawings. Sure, no problem. But, no-o-o, that would cost some Danish funds, too. No, no. They need those funds for…hash, evidently. So, just include BAD diagrams, BADLY reproduced and VAGUE AS HELL. Sure. No reason to be all anal-retentive like those AMERICAN engineers. This is the freaking DANISH SCHOOL OF IMPRESSIONISTIC ENGINEERING. You know, ‘put that dowel rod in this hole, if you’d like, or maybe one of the other many holes we’ve provided you. Whatever YOU think.’

Thank you.

2

Unbelievable. :roll:

Hey, there are Danish speakers on board here, aren’t there?

3

Seriously, though, Dale… Tell us what you really think.

I don’t know that we’ve ever seen you this worked up - if asked, I’d have thought you COULDN’T get this worked up.

And I thought that it couldn’t get any worse than Korean instructions translated into English by an engineer who only speaks Punjabi and/ or Urdu.

4

Dale,

I sense you are frustrated…

I’m NOT Danish.
Jeroen

5

Right. How can I be sure?

6

  1. My wife has her finger in a cup of ice because she tried to help me fight the Danish corporation.

  2. The thing nearly toppled over and fell on us.

Neither of these is probably directly the fault of the Danish furniture designers that are now my enemies. But, I think we can agree that is not the point.

  1. The thing is nearly finished and it’s nearly as attractive as it was in the store. Marilyn and I, however, are nearly finished and are not nearly as attractive as we were in the store.
7

When you posted “danish engineers” and “blood pressure” I thought you meant some snack cake company. :smiley:

8

No way! Are you serious? What if the only tools you have are Chhattisgarhian? How can you expect tools to work in a language with which they aren’t familiar? The barbarians! Oh the inhumanity of it all, the racial discrimination, the humidity!

9

I’d love to be Danish. But sadly, I am just not.

10

sings; There is NOTHING like a DANE, Nothing in the world…

‘South Pacific’ by Rodgers and Hammerstein.
(Maybe I heard it wrong) :laughing:

Hey Dale ‘Hammerstein’ sounds suspiciously Danish… :astonished:

11

Sounds like an IKEA hangover. Don’t even get me started about that place and their outlandishly named products. Stuff seems great at first, once you clear the assembly hurdle then it falls apart if you have kids that “torque” things by actually living with them. Thanks to a local ACE hardware store, I was able to replace metric threaded rods that got cross-threaded the first time my son “helped” me assemble his gray metal bedstand.

The honeymoon is over for me there and with any Scandi-furn. You know, Americans make some of the nicest furniture in the world, but its pricey.

12

We have this area of town up I-85 with all of these furniture outlets nearby. There are more than a few Skandihoovian furniture stores there. Anyway, I have been trying to talk my wife into this table. It is really unusual. In its normal position, its round and it sits like 4 people, but if you open it up and turn a crank, and let this thigamabob come up from the middle, it expands into a kind of triangular shape and will seat like, 6. It is totally cool. Dale, no assembly required! :smiley:

13

I’ve seen tables like that before, but instead of a crank, the table pulls apart and a piece of wood goes in there. Underneath the table top there is a place to store the extra section.

14

This thread makes me grateful that I can build my own stuff.

Although I must admit, I’m definitely partial to those white and natural Windsor chair/table combinations that come from Indonesia and Malasia.

That stuff is made of hevea wood, by the way, which is rubber tree wood from plantations. After 25 years, the rubber trees stop producing latex and have to be cut down and replanted. It yields a beautiful, golden, hard wood that doesn’t deplete the forests.

We’ve got 13 of those chairs and three different versions of the tables. (We’re up to five children with three more on the way. Dale, we’ll be calling you for advice any day now.)

15

Dale, I’m glad to hear that you, your wife and your bookcase are all still in one piece… each.

I found an online Danish translation service that states, “A team of excellent translators (all native Danes) are available - no projects are too big or too small.” Do you think this one is too small? :wink:

We have some IKEA barstools at work. As Weeks mentioned, usually their products have unpronounceable one-word names like Hralgr. But these barstools have the oddly comforting name of Dennis.

madfifer9
a moose once bit my sister

16

Hi Dale, I am Danish, and I too sense that you are getting all excited.

Too bad about those furniture instructions. When I buy Ikea furniture, they don’t come with written/text instructions either, but then again none are needed, since the pictures say it all (it’s not rocket science, after all). Is your bookshelf somehow different, ie. you can’t follow the all-picture instructions? It sounds to me like this is your chance to prove yourself to be a real handyman! :wink:

Apart from that, you’ve got your facts wrong: Denmark doesn’t sport legal narcotics of any kind (hash as prescription medicine for people with chronic, very painful illnesses is being discussed at the moment), and being in possession of hash certainly isn’t legal in Denmark! Actually, I think you must be confusing Denmark with The Netherlands. You know, two different countries, both small, both in Europe, both sport languages that doesn’t remind you of English at all. Very confusing.

Oh, another thing: Danish currency is the kroner. F’instance, if I go into my local pub I’ll say “må jeg be’ om en stor Guinness?”, and the bartender will reply words to the effect of “okay, det bliver 45 kroner”. (which is pretty darned expensive for a pint, if you ask me).

Dale, you a sensible guy. Please get your fact right next time, rather than succumb to cultural/national stereotyping. I am sure you don’t want me to start a thread or two about Americans and how gun-fixated, warmongering and totally lacking in culture they all are, do you?

(Disclaimer: The above was just an example of an inflammatory topic. I really don’t believe all Americans are gun-fixated, warmongering or devoid of culture).

If you want to voice your complaint to the nice people at Tvilum-whatever (actually, I don’t know whether they are nice or not, but being Danish, the odds probably aren’t too good), here’s the URL for doing so:

http://www.tvilum-scanbirk.dk/asp_uk/kontaktbody.asp

But since you’ve been to their website, you probably know already…

Cheers,
Jens

17

Well said Jens

18

Disclaimer: I’m not Danish. Or, at least, my mum didn’t tell me so.

However, just as I reckoned from down here South on the same shore that the pesø is not the Danish currency, I can tell you the Danish avoir-du-pesø is the måtrik systëm.

It’s based on the meter, which currently rates at about 10% higher than the yard but it’s often the case before US presidential elections.

Thing is, the meter and its freakin’ equal-tempered subdivisions (oddly going by 1/10, 1/1000, etc. instead of your cool 1/12th, 1/21 or 1/1024) applies to all the hardware. For instance, tightening a 12 mm bolt with a 0.5 in. wrench may be an effective way to screw up, but not to screw it tight. Things get even messier with hex (Allen) wrenches, because you need a magnifying glass to see what’s scribbled on them for size reference.

Holy moose, isn’t Ikea Swedish, not Danish?

19

It dëfinitöly is!

20

I’m alarmed to hear that IKEA is spawning Danish imitators. The IKEA idea of saying it all with pictures seems like a good idea, but it is sadly wanting in the execution. I don’t think I’ve ever assembled an IKEA item without having to undo some bit of it halfway through because a detail was not sufficiently clearly highlighted in the drawings.

And every set of instructions contains at least one indication which is inaccurate - there are always more or less holes shown in the drawings than are present on the actual pieces. I think they do it because otherwise the assembly would be so easy that you wouldn’t have a sense of achievement.

PS - sticking to the national stereotypes, here’s an existential question: can a hole be present?