The trellis comes disassembled. The instruction say that the trellis will take 5 minutes to put it together and assembly does not require any tools. It took me about an hour and I needed tools to work around some misalignment issues of how the notches and holes were cut on some of the bars.
I am attaching a collage of 8 pictures numbered 1 through 8 under customer photos that I will be referencing in this review.
1) Photo #1 shows the package as it arrived.
2) Photo #3 shows the hardware that comes with the trellis: plastic male and female screws that hold the trellis and 2 metal brackets that can be used to mount the trellis itself.
3) Photo #2 shows a close-up of the male and female screws that snap together to hold the vertical and horizontal slats together. The three tall slats have notches where the horizontal slats fit and then held together my male/female screws.
4) Some of the holes had wood debris still attached to the hole. When I tried forcing one of the plastic screws through without clearing up the debris with a drill/screwdriver I damaged one of the mail screws. Photo #4 shows the screw. After that I learned to clear the hole with a metal screwdriver first. Fortunately, the kit has three extra screw pairs so I was able to discard the damaged screw.
5) Most of slats went in without too much problems, but two of them had real alignment issues. Picture #5 demonstrates the alignment issue where the notch and the hole do not light up with the holes. Photo #7 shows one of the slats which have a proper alignment. By enlarging the hole I was able to snap the screws, but this made a trellis a bit more wobbly than the parts that align well.
6) Photo #6 shows a large splinter on one of the tall slats. I have glued it down with a wood glue, hopefully this will hold.
My recommendations for assembly:
1. First examine all holes, and smooth them out with a screwdriver or a drill bit, so the plastic screws don't get damaged by having to push through wood debris.
2. Then attach all horizontal bars only with female screws (i.e. do not snap in male screws) to check the alignment. If you need to enlarge holes to fix alignment it is a lot easier to do when you can easily disassemble the entire trellis, fix the holes, and put it back together. It is possible to unsnap the screws but I was worried about breaking the wood slats, they are not thick.
3. I found the following tools helpful:
--- mallet for taping in the screws
--- drill to enlarge misaligned holes
--- screw driver to remove wooden debris from the holes so the screws are not damaged when they are pushed in
--- wood glue to glue down any large splinters
Overall, I found the trellis nice looking: simple pleasant design, attractive color, just what I was looking for. I was somewhat disappointed in quality but was able to work around the problems.
You can find it on Amazon by following this link.
Ali Julia review ★★★☆☆
No comments:
Post a Comment