I

've been working for a few weeks on building an LCD wall mount so that I can watch a 17" computer monitor rigged for DVD movies in bed ... while lying down (head on pillow). In other words, I want a wall mount that will put me between the screen and the wall rather than the LCD between me and the wall ... which is what all wall mounts are designed to do.

I want the experience of a 60-70 inch LCD screen on the opposite wall for the price of a 17 inch one seen close up. I know this will work out just great but no one makes the mount that I want (and if they did they'd charge me at least $300 for it. Screw that noise.

Because of price constraints, I can't fabricate any parts. I have to get everything off the shelf at Home Depot or the like. I've settled (currently) on Black pipe which is what is used for natural gas. And, I ruled out EMT tubing because of unsatisfactory (for my purposes) connectors.

Here are some of my designs:

This is my first design with black pipe. There were several other "mental" designs with EMT tubing before I started to make pictures. Rollover the image to see a few other altered designs.

I considered the use of PVC connectors because they are light and can be threaded onto the pipe a few extra turns ... but have since reconsidered because PVC is simply too weak to take the torque put on the threads. I can tear out the pipe from PVC with fairly little effort by arm strength but metal connectors are perhaps ten times stronger and "feel" trustworthy for the weight of a light monitor (9-15 pounds).

The above are arm booms which enable the user to deploy the monitor to any position within two arcs (short and long). A straight, non-adjustable boom can only be deployed along one arc and if you want it closer or further away, you have to move your position relative to the monitor. I find this undesirable but may have to settle for less if my last creation doesn't work.

This most recent design (slide booms) awaits a weekend trip to Home Depot to get some metal connectors. I'm still going to use PVC for the "slide mechanism". These won't be taking much torque. I think they will do fine in this context.

I'm wasting some cash on experiments but generally this is a tinker-toy set I'm adding to and I can reuse pieces to make other potentially useful designs. I just need a slightly bigger set ;o) I haven't as yet absolutely ruled out any basic model pending the outcome of construction with all metal connectors and tightened with a pipe wrench. I'm reluctant to make a model fully tightened because it's too hard to get it apart so I can't test the torque parameter for an arm boom without a major "commitment".

I'll have more to say later on.

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