How To Ensure Your Flat-Pack Furniture Products Can Actually Be Put Together

Check most of the reviews for flat-packed furniture that you see online, and you'll see at least a few complaints about holes not lining up properly on a drawer or cabinet door. If your factory is beginning to produce flat-pack furniture, ensuring the drilled holes for screws, nails, and pegs are in the correct locations is essential for success. Inspecting these should be a key part of your quality control process.

Use Tapped Hole Location Gauges 

As you start to produce pieces for the furniture sets, check hole locations with a tapped hole location gauge. You may check more at first when you are beginning to produce the furniture, of course, as you want to make sure everything is starting out correctly. If everything continues to pass that test, you can reduce the number of times you check. But definitely keep checking as machinery can always start to be a little less accurate over time.

Pull Random Sets out and Assemble Them

It may help a lot if you pull random sets of pieces out of the inventory and try to assemble them for quality control. If the hole locations seem off, get the tapped hole gauges out and see what's going on. It could be that the holes are drilled slightly off-target or that the holes are drilled so that they are crooked, with the openings in the right places but the shaft of the hole heading off in the wrong direction. Your quality control team should set up a schedule to regularly try to assemble pieces to catch these problems before they affect much of your inventory.

Keep Checking the Manufacturing Machinery

Properly programmed machinery should produce pieces where hole locations are in the right place and will match up with all the other necessary pieces. Never assume that this will always be the case. Keep checking the machinery that produces the parts to ensure that the drilling portion of the production process continues to place the holes in the correct locations. It isn't enough to just measure those random slabs of particle board, even though that is an essential task. You want to ensure that as the machinery continues working and begins to age, it doesn't start to drift so that holes are produced slightly off-target. Keep inspecting the machinery along with doing those other tests.

Your flat-pack endeavor will gain a lot of customer support if they can put the parts together without forcing or redrilling any of the connections or holes. Make inspections of the machinery and hole locations a frequent part of your maintenance routine.

Learn more about tapped hole location gages.

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