Found In the Woods

I decided to repurpose my old Ikea Bonde TV shelf and add-on unit to be less of a TV bench and more of a media center. I don’t have any before pictures, so this old Ikea catalog photo will have to do:

I previously used it with a Sony WEGA CRT television for ages, then, about 20 years ago, moving to a Vizio 40″ TV (just fit). Thanks to the magic of Reddit, I found the original part numbers/listings:

Now I plan on upgrading to a 55″+ TV so this can’t be used for its intended purpose. I still wanted to have a place for all of my stereo equipment, turntable, etc along with a myriad of old video game consoles. This unit has tons of spaces for such things, so I decided to reimagine it as just a media center.

After disassembling the unit I carefully measured and cut the sides. I then transferred all of the various holes for the OEM hardware, being careful not to penetrate the sidewall of the unit with the drill and get the correct depth for each hole. I used an aluminum cutting guide as a straight edge to get a clean cut. A new Diablo fine finish blade in the saw made nice clean cuts. I did a test cut first to be sure. The whole job took about 4-5 hours including setup and cleanup.

Here’s the finished unit. It’s not set up at all, just doing a test fit to be sure things work. And they do. It all lines up perfectly, sits nicely and will do the job. Now comes the fun part, hooking up all of those components! And out of curiosity, the shelves in the background are this part: