Ikea Besta disappointing

Hello, I found the previous BESTA corpuses quite stable sideways, which was also due to the grooves in the back panel. These still exist, so I am somewhat surprised. An empty tall cabinet with doors already tips forward when you open a door. That already shows how sensible it is to attach the cabinet to the wall. Several elements next to each other should be screwed together. Then nothing can warp anymore. You don't lay cables every day, so it's not too much work to loosen a fastener once in a while. By the way, drilling holes in the wall is part of the intended use of an apartment and cannot be prohibited. Only not too many dowels should be used. I don't understand why you shouldn't be able to drive a nail from the back through the edge and back panel.

Precisely because the back panels have these grooves, we are so surprised that the cabinets move sideways. It’s not much, just enough so that the doors on the side where you open them hang about half a centimeter lower than on the hinge side. A play of a few millimeters in the back panel is enough for that. And since it’s so little, it probably does very little good to put brackets in the corners.

The cabinets only actually tip forward if you open all the doors at the same time; otherwise, they stand very securely, we have tested that. Screwing them together would be an option for two of the three cabinets; the other one stands on the other side of the TV unit, so that wouldn’t help and we would have to look for another solution anyway.

By the way, attaching to the wall would be very complicated and not just possible easily. Not only is the floor uneven, but the walls also show obvious waves. Sometimes the spacers for the screws are too short, even fully unscrewed, sometimes too long so that they push the cabinet away from the wall at the top. Even if you screwed the cabinet to the wall, the back panel would still have play—as I said, a few millimeters, but one or two millimeters is enough for the cabinet to warp. Two screws at the top would then not be enough...

And that you are not allowed to drill into a wall is currently not the case for us, but I experienced that in my last student dorm; on the drywall there you were not even allowed to attach a magnetic pinboard.

I wouldn’t know where to drive the nails through. The frame is 16mm thick, then I would have to hit the back panel, which is only just barely inserted into the top, so that the nail doesn’t tear out immediately.

Maybe someone still has an idea or possibly the same problem?

That you are not allowed to drill in the student dormitory is somewhat understandable. In the worst case, someone new moves in every semester, and if everyone drills however they please, the wall will be Swiss cheese after at most 5 years and nothing will hold there anymore.

Regarding your problem: For Besta there is the wall rail. This should prevent the cabinets from shifting and warping. And if the rail (and thus the cabinets) is mounted horizontally, it is also easier to align the individual cabinets; you only need to adjust the legs so that they rest well on the floor.

And if the wall is uneven, you just have to put something underneath so that the rail hangs evenly and does not form waves. I used drywall spacers made of plastic for this (although for an Ikea kitchen, but the principle is the same). Here is an example of what something like that looks like: Silverline 633499 drywall spacer, I found mine at the hardware store. Because of the "horseshoe shape," you can easily hang them on the half-screwed screws in the appropriate thickness without them falling off.

Best regards

Hello,
the cabinets are laterally stable if you attach them to the wall or screw them together with other cabinets. Of course, it would be better if they were stable in themselves, but they are cardboard lid cabinets after all.
Behind the back panel are chipboard strips where you can screw in screws. If you drive a few nails through these strips and the back panel, the back panel can no longer shift.

I wouldn’t drive nails through that. The Pax back panel is just the cheapest MDF or something like that. Recently, I made a hole in a BESTA bench (the regular one, not the TV bench) through the back panel with a hole saw. It’s just the cheapest stuff. If you drive nails through there and then load the cabinet, the lateral forces would probably be so great that the holes in the back panel would tear out and the whole structure would lean sideways, so nothing gained. If possible, I would marry the corpses together. There are furniture connector screws and then best through the already pre-drilled holes for the shelves. Because there are also chipboard strips here. Then the whole thing has stability and can no longer splay. Unfortunately, BESTA furniture bends and twists in all directions if they are not all connected to each other or not doweled to the wall. IKEA furniture must basically be fastened somehow, somewhere. Either to the wall or to each other. That’s when stability comes in.