Cut and Routed Monitor Mount

After measuring my monitor about 30 times, I marked the area to remove and then drilled starter holes for my jig-saw. For a workbench, I've been using my old TV stand; it works amazingly well. I can clamp the board down to the table so I don't need a second person to hold the board. The red things are bit of rubber so I don't mark the wood.

The aluminum bar is a guide bar to help me cut a straight line (I can't even saw straight). This worked really really well. The only drawback was that it didn't prevent me from tilting the saw from side to side; which ended up in a few uneven parts in the back.

Here's the finished square cut. It looks really good at this point, unfortunately it isn't very functional. It is too deep, the transition to the level of the monitor is sharp (needs beveled), and there is no place for the control buttons.

The next thing I did was routed the back 1/4" deep so the monitor would set in a little. And beveled the front of the monitor 45 degrees so you could more easily see edges from an angle. This was a lot easier than I thought it would be. My new router is a pretty fun toy... I mean tool. The upper part of this image shows the flat-routing on the back; the bottom shows the front beveled routing.

Replaced Monitor Mount

The original monitor mount was in pretty bad shape. And when I decided to use an LCD monitor I needed a different size mount anyway. So I started with a 3/4" oak board and cut it to 22"x22" to match the mount holder. I decided to splurg on the monitor and get a UltraSharp 2007FP 20-inch Flat Panel. It is definately overkill for my purposes, but I wanted a "big" monitor and this was the best solution I could find. I am sure "purists" will babble about it not being a CRT, but I figure I am using an emulator anyway, right? Besides, it weighs about 1/10 as much and is about 1/8 as thick.

Stripped and Sanded Control Panel

The first image actually shows the INSIDE of the panel; I forgot to take a before-picture of the outside. It was covered in a thick layer of red paint and had massive amounts of old cement from the previous vinyl cover. After peeling off the old vinyl cover (breaking it bit by bit) I used a product called Citristrip Stripping Gel to do most of the hard work. It took a couple of applications, but got most of the paint and glue off with minimal effort and lots of mess. This product is nice in that it smells good and doesn't have toxic fumes. However Californians believe it to contain chemicals which cause reproductive harm. w00t