By Jeff Linville,
Kids Today
BURLINGTON, N.C. — Before new furniture designs make it to the showroom floor, many of them have to pass muster with a staff of very abusive people here.
They work at Diversified Testing Laboratories, which has been in business for three decades checking furniture, fabric and other products for qualities including safety and durability. Bobby Puett and Karon Matkins own the laboratory.
One key part of the testing business is bunk bed safety. During the mid 1980s, juvenile furniture manufacturers and consumer advocates joined with the American Society for Testing of Materials to set up a voluntary program to improve bunk bed safety, Puett said.
He said he and furniture makers were alarmed to learn that 200 children had died and many more had been injured in bunk beds. The most common problem was entrapment — a child’s head caught between two boards or rails, or becoming wedged between the bed and the wall.
Bed makers were putting up safety rails to keep children from rolling out of bed, but in some cases, the rails included spaces big enough for toddlers to get their heads through. Manufacturers also didn’t always include a rail on the back side of the bed, figuring the child couldn’t roll off if it was against a wall. However, if the bed slid out from the wall just a few inches, there was enough space for a child to become trapped.
Voluntary standards were put in place in the 1980s. In 2000, the U.S. government enacted federal standards, which apply to any youth furniture sold domestically, whether U.S.-made or imported.
Puett said meeting youth safety standards mostly came down to slight changes in design — making sure bunk bed slats are bolted on tight, for instance, and ensuring that spaces between any two hard surfaces are smaller than 3½ inches (too narrow for the child’s head to fit through) or greater than nine inches (wide enough for the child to get free).
Two weight tests check the strength of a bunk bed’s side rails and foundation support. The lab hangs 225 pounds of weight on the rail 10 inches from the corner, ensuring that it’s strong enough to hold a ladder. The lab also gradually adds up to 400 pounds of weight on the top bunk, even though manufacturers usually warn parents not to exceed 300 pounds on the top bunk.
Once a bed sample has undergone the grueling workout at Diversified, parents can feel safe that their bed will hold up under everyday stresses. As one youth furniture manufacturer said, making a bed childproof is harder than making it foolproof, because kids will try something a fool would never think of.
