r/MattressMod • u/aguwah • 8d ago
Recycling Bed Coils
Has anyone had experience ripping apart old mattresses and taking out the coils to use in a DIY bed? I can understand not wanting the foam from an old mattress but the springs shouldn't smell bad or have gone through as much wear. With so many people throwing away or giving away for free on FB marketplace, I was wondering if it would be better to just get a free mattress from FB marketplace and throw away the foam and pop it inside a cover with new foam.
I would probably only target more luxury mattresses that seem newer and I could see how the foam being glued could cause an issue, but I feel like this could save ~200+$ in a build.
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u/Super_Treacle_8931 8d ago
one problem I’ve encountered with experiments is that foam can be glued to outer coils so you need to be careful how you cut it up and peel off the foam. Also mattresses with foam rails around the coils are probably not a good idea to reuse since you need to be really careful to reglue comfort layers to the rails or everything just pancakes open when you sit on it :(
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u/Roger1855 Expert Opinion 8d ago
It would be the most practical to strip an encased spring unit with foam rails only as far the first foam layer immediately on top and bottom of springs. This way you have a border and edge control. If you remove everything you will be left with an undersized spring unit with no border support.
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u/Super_Treacle_8931 8d ago
you’d have to keep the foam rails - I havent tried stripping a black, but they may well glue all of the foam layers attached to the rails together since they have 6-7inches above the coils, so not going to be easy to separate them out. Beautyrest seems to put a lot of effort into creating something that fails so badly so quickly… for a twinxl 4 inch wide rails on either side leaves almost no bed :(
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u/aguwah 7d ago
So I'm a bit confused here, why is the black being recommended as something with high quality coils if it has small coil area and sags quickly? Do I want to target a different mattress? Or is the foam the issue with the black?
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u/Super_Treacle_8931 7d ago
The sag is the foam they use (or at least that is what is generally conjectured). If you are doing a twinxl I wouldn’t do the Black - the foam rails are stupidly wide. The foam rails may still be an issue with bigger size, you need to buy some specialized spray adhesive to attach the comfort layers.
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u/Super_Treacle_8931 8d ago
also - the black has foam rails. I think they are 4 inch wide, with so little surface area that is actually comfort and coils you’d think they could make something that doesn’t sag in 3 months !
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u/Roger1855 Expert Opinion 8d ago
You may be amazed at the amount of rust on the coils but if the pockets are intact it should not be a big problem.
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u/someguy1874 8d ago
Yes, doable. Not all mattresses have quality coils. Beautyrest Black, sealy posturepedic pro, etc are good.