The Mod
Today I had a first in my life: a furniture mod.I've modded game controllers. Sports games. But I've never really been in the "man with tool" realm.
The object of my wrection was a t.v. stand/stereo cabinet. It's made out of very expensive black particle board. It's just the right size to fit into my study, and it's been a very good value, with one exception.
The exception is if I never need to recable anything that's actually inside the cabinet. In that case, it becomes a Faustian bargain--there's just a small cutout in the back panel, and trying to do anything is almost impossible.
Yes, I just used the phrase "Faustian bargain" to describe a stereo cabinet. This is why people should never be English majors.
Over time, I'd enlarged the size of the cutout (it looked like it had been attacked by a small shark), but I still had to go through inhuman gyrations and change cabling largely by feel. Usually, after doing this I felt like I'd been beaten with a ball-peen hammer.
Hey, dumb ass, why don't you just take off the back panel?, you might ask. Well, that would have been the obvious thing to do, except I saw a similarly cheap cabinet like this once begin to sway like a tightrope walker in a high wind when that panel was removed. It was unlikely to happen with this cabinet, but I was still very paranoid about the boom-crash-%*$# possibilities.
Today, though, I happened on a solution. Surely if I just cut a board and screwed it into both sides of the cabinet, it would provide enough support. I could use a 3" board which I already had in the garage and just cut it to size.
In my mind, birds began to sing. A choir sang hallejuah.
So long, back panel. Hello, full rear cabinet access.
And best of all, it was easy to do. In theory.
In practice, and let me be brief about this, I cut the board too short, which resulted in the screws splitting the board, which made me cut another board with some buffer length.
At one point, I was unscrewing the wood screw from the other side of the now unusable board. When I pulled out the screw it was burning hot. I turned to Gloria and said "Feel this," handing her the screw.
"It's hot," she said.
"Do you know what that is?" I asked.
"What?"
"Man heat," I said. "It's the heat we men generate when we do manly things."
After cutting the second board, I was screwing it into the back of the cabinet when I noticed that the particle board itself now had a hairline crack.
Nice.
This meant I had to make a trip to Home Depot for a clamp to ensure that the tiny hairline fracture would have no reason to spread. This was also at 4 p.m., when every school bus and every single person in the city was apparently driving. So a 5 minute drive to Home Depot took 25 minutes, and the trip home took another 20 more.
Oh, and because of that hairline crack, I didn't quite finish screwing in the board, in fear that it would make the split worse. So that back brace has about half an inch of screw protruding from each end of the board.
Classy.
However, to be fair, I couldn't have made one of those screws flush anyway, because it was pretty much stripped by the time it was 2/3 of the way in.
I'm lucky this was a simple mod. If I tried anything complicated, the headline would have read FOUR DEAD IN HOME IMPROVEMENT DISASTER
Experts baffled at death scene: what was he trying to do?
I did finish, finally, and now I can access every single freaking cable behind my receiver. Which I'll probably never need to do again.
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