How-to: Make the (almost) extinct 97x40cm Oxberg Glass Doors

Half height Oxberg Glass Doors for BILLY bookcase

Materials:
4 x 97x40cm Oxberg solid doors (502.755.96)

4 x 192x40cm Oxberg glass doors (902.756.17)

2 x 202x80cm Billy bookcases (002.638.50)

2 x 35x80cm Billy height extension units (402.638.53)

1 x length of cornice from Wickes.

This hack is basically about how to get 97 x 40 cm Oxberg glass doors which, for some strange reason, IKEA do not stock. This hack is a direct response to the question raised by ‘Hotshot’ on the Ikea Hackers website.

Due to the positioning of the hinge sockets, this hack can only be performed on the 192 x 40cm full height Oxberg glass doors and not using the 192 x 40cm Oxberg glass/panel doors.

The hack for each door has two stages:

1) Remove the half of the door that has only one hinge socket by very carefully making a right angled cut through the upright stiles of the door just above the centre rail. The closer you can get to the centre rail without actually catching the foil covering of the centre rail the neater the finished door will look. The foil covering is very thin so it does mark very easily with any wayward saw motion.

I would recommend using a small toothed tenon saw for these cuts. Extra care must be taken as at some points you are sawing up to the glass panel (see IKEA’s warning at the end of this post).

I cut the front side of both stiles first then very carefully turned over the door to then cut through the rear sides. Once cut all the way through, the glass panel does pull away easily from the centre rail as I found that the glass is only glued into the side stiles.

The end rail of the waste section can be used for practise cuts (as per photo) before attempting the cuts for real on the centre rail.

2) At the ends of the stiles on the waste section of the door are some glued on, plastic end caps. I, again very carefully, cut these off the stiles and soaked them in water overnight. This made scraping off the remainders of the mdf stile on the back of end caps slightly easier (still a bit laborious when you’ve got eight to do). I then re-glued these end caps to the cut ends of the stiles at the centre rail with contact adhesive. Alternatively, you could use the appropriate iron on edging strip for the door colour e.g. white, birch etc..

The centre rail (which is now one end of the door) does have a chamfered edge, as opposed to the normal square edge. As the bookcase I was doing was over 2 metres high, I found it looked better to have the chamfered edges of the glass doors at the top of the bookcases, where the difference was less noticeable. If I was putting these modified glass doors on a 106 x 80cm Billy bookcase I would probably put the chamfered edge at the bottom. This is just a matter of personal taste.

A warning from IKEA: “IKEA can’t recommend doing this due to the health and safety implications that this can bring, along with this as the doors have been cut down I’m sure you will be understanding that the guarantee on the cut down doors would be void.”

And an explanation from IKEA Sweden on why they don’t stock this size of Oxberg glass doors:

“The overall strategy for HFB 2 is to widen the offer and start moving away from our 4 families one of which is BILLY. This we know is what consumers are demanding from us. This means taking away the dept off the offer and here the doors were impacted in BILLY to be more efficient. The glass/panel doors offers the same solution. At the same time two half doors so to speak is actually technically not possible with the new construction.”

If you can understand what this explanation actually means then you are doing better than I am!

Cut stiles at centre rail.

End caps cut off

Oxberg door cut down with test cut on waste half

Hack version using cut down Oxberg glass doors with added cornice. [1]

A big thank you to ‘Hotshot’ for the suggestion of trying this as I think these doors look so much better than IKEA’s only option of Morliden glass doors (pictured below).

Billy Bookcase Leeds Store - Oxberg and Morliden mix [1000.]

~ LeBlur