A massive recall of baby cribs made by a B.C. company is been attributed to improperly installed brackets. That's according to the manufacturer. CTV Consumer Reporter Chris Olsen went digging to find another possible explanation.

"We went to get Brody out of the crib and realized his crib had broken," explained Barry Lancaster, an Abbotsford father.

A mattress support bracket on his son's crib had failed. The crib is from Stork Craft -- the brackets have been recalled.

"I looked under the crib mattress and it says it's rated for 50 pounds and he weighs 25 so if it's rated for double the weight I think it should be able to handle his," said Lancaster.

We took the broken bracket to Acuren Labs in Richmond. They put the broken bracket into a scanning electron microscope. And the conclusion?

"It looks like metal fatigue," said Andrew Seymour, a professional engineer. "We looked at that fracture surface in our scanning electron microscope and saw evidence, definitive evidence of the fatigue type failure."

Metal fatigue. And when you see the break magnified -- individual lines show the bracket breaking just a little bit at a time over several weeks or months. A possible cause -- a rambunctious happy little boy who likes to push on the rail of his crib

"Pushing on the bars, jumping up and down and it's going to be working itself back and forth multiple times in order to initiate that failure," explained Seymour.

And if the brackets are loose that makes it worse. So parents need to make sure that the bolts are all tight. And would parents notice the bracket is weakening due to metal fatigue.

"It would be hard to tell definitively if something like that was going on," said Seymour. "You would potentially see a little crack at the surface where the crack is growing from."

We took the broken bracket into Stork Craft headquarters and gave it to president Jim Moore who took it to his operations manager -- he agreed with the metal fatigue finding

"This portion of the bracket has had movements side to side like this causing those striations, and then causing metal fatigue which would hence break the bracket."

Stock Craft has had 50,000 inquires on its website and two thousand more calls -- from parents looking for more information or replacement brackets.

"There are about two thousand brackets a day that can be made that's how quickly we can produce them,'

Consumers should expect to start receiving them next week by courier. The crib meets or exceeds current safety standards. The question is, now that the company has voluntarily strengthened its product, -- should the government change the standard.

And there are two new recalls to tell you about tonight...

  • Eight hundred Olympia 3-in-1 cribs distributed by Dorel Canada have been recalled. The wooden slats can break and create a dangerous gap. The cribs were sold at Toys "R" us between April 2006 and January 2008.

  • And about 1,000 of the Fisher-Price "Rainforest Portable Play Yards" have been recalled following reports of children being injured after the side rail collapsed. The play yards were sold across Canada from January 2007 until now.

For more information and serial numbers you can link here to the Health Canada webpage.