PJ Wardle, left, and Chris Evans are in the Hire a Hubby business. Picture: Alex Coppel Herald Sun
FLAT pack furniture, bikes in kits, computer-riddled cars and barbecues in boxes are crushing men's can-do spirit.
Business is booming for professional assemblers, who say plenty of calls now come from baffled and beaten blokes.
More still come from women, who send out an SOS after watching the DIY drama unfold as male egos are applied to nightmarishly tricky tasks.
Complex kits, and less shed time shared by boys and dads, have been blamed for men increasingly getting out of their depth.
Hire a Hubby, a firm cashing in on less-handy men, says about one in five calls for help now come from bewildered blokes.
''They have a go, as a good strong Aussie male would do, but they get halfway and they can't do it,'' operations manager Mick Trimble said.
''We get called when the job is half done, when the wife has cracked it. They say things like, `My bathroom's been in pieces for three weeks now'.
''We are also increasingly getting calls from males. I don't think men are getting soft. It's the knowledge thing. I've been to places where the hubby will hide in the bedroom while I do the work.''
Flat packs, once reserved for straightforward items such as coffee tables, are almost inescapable and can be frighteningly complex.
Some bunks take an expert more than 10 hours to assemble, leaving most men no chance.
Curtin University Professor of Masculinity Studies David Buchbinder says while computer savvy has grown, mechanical ability has fallen away.
He says women used to be able to bake a cake from scratch and could now do it half themselves, with some satisfaction, by using a mix. But men cannot get away with half-built furniture.
Younger men were less likely to feel failure faced with a flat pack because they could probably afford an expert, and their peers were just as inept.
''Everybody's got an equal level of incompetence,'' he said.
IKEA plans to ramp up assembly help, saying men are short on skill and time.
''In the coming months this is an area on which we are planning to place more emphasis,'' spokeswoman Jude Leon said.
Aussemble said men deluded themselves that, with an allen key, they could do anything.
''Men ring and it's along the lines of, `Ego got the better of me. I can't do the flat pack','' national operations manager Ian Gray said.
And it's not only furniture. It's also other one-time manly duties such as car maintenance.
''I lift the bonnet here and I can't even see the engine,'' Mr Gray said.
''All I can see is the hole where you plug in the computer.''
brownt@heraldsun.com.au