I had put the old monitor on top of that blue bin while a rubbed down my sized MDF. I was just finished and stepped back to take a picture of my handy-work and... well... you can see what happened next.
I said this very early on in this project but it bears repeating: Freegle is your friend.
In desperation after this latest calamity I checked every available option:
Ebay - Two 14" monitors listed, the closest being in Nottingham (200 miles away) with a £10 'collection only' price
Friday Ads - Closest was Kent (50 miles), only wanted a fiver but wasn't sure it worked, also, possibly 17".
Gumtree - Nothing. Not a single CRT monitor listed in the area.
Local paper - Nothing.
Freecycle - Posted on Friday night, heard nothing as of time of writing.
But Freegle... on Freegle I had a response less than 24hrs after I posted my 'Wanted' ad and I had collected the new monitor, from a guy who lives 6 miles away, less than 12 hours after that. My sixth monitor (I think, I have genuinely lost count). All from Freegle.
Also, the guy also gave me these as a bonus:
I'm not actually sure I'm going to be able to use these - certainly not in their current form anyway - but I'm going to pry them apart and seeing if it's worth doing anything with the innards - it would be nice to have stereo sound after all, albeit with the slightly bittersweet realisation that I would have wasted more than a tenner on amps... We'll see.
I haven't been back to the garage to check how the new monitor fits in my skeleton cabinet yet but all signs point to it being pretty much a like-for-like replacement. I know it's exactly the same width - and that alone means that it's very unlikely I'll need to any fundamental rebuilding. Which is a great result.
That's all I have for now. After I broke the monitor I went inside and sulked for the rest of the evening, so in real terms I haven't really made any progress - even though it feels like I've dodged a bit of a bullet.
