[zhe zhang]

Here is some info about my home made mount. Hope it will help someone get some ideas.


We usually watch TV in the family room. However during daytime, my wife likes to watch it from the kitchen. which is 90 degrees from the family room sofa. My original TV was on a lazy Susan, so she could rotate it.


We got our 42" panny in February, to be able to watch it in the same manner, we got some 1 1/4" square steel pipe, borrowed a welder, and made our own mount.


Here is a drawing of the mount. It is installed on a post between two windows in a corner of the family room. All the cables run through the bottom arm which has a hole on each end. However, the 1 1/4" square pipe is quite tight for the cables.

 

[Chris J]

I can use one of those when I get my 42 inch panny for my bedroom.

 

[Mark Norton]

Looks interesting but you need to fix the brakcet extremely securely to the wall. The Panny weighs about 30kg and if the radius arm is 1m and weighs, say 10kg itself, thats more than 350 Nm (or 260 pounds-feet) of torque trying to tear it off the wall. It would not be the happiest day in your life to come down one morning and find it on the floor.

 

[zhe zhang]

Thanks for the reminder. That was my main concern as well. However I think I am safe here.


The arm is 30" long. The end that is attached to the wall is welded to a 30" long 2" steel angle and the angle is attached to a 6x6" post between two windows. The angle is attached with six 5/16x4" lag screws, two on the bottom and 4 on the top. With the 30" (2.5 ft) steel angle and 4 screws on the top, the 260 pounds-feet of torque translates to about 25 pounds of pull for each screw.


As a matter of fact, to prevent seeing the plasma laying on the floor, I did a couple of pull-ups from the end of the arm before the plasma was attached and with only two screws on top (I am 210 pounds). Under this condition, the pull on each screw is 130 pounds, so I have at least a factor of 5 safety margin.

 

[Autom8ed]

I'd be interested to see how this turns out.


What you have in essence is an articulating wall mount minus one pivot point.


I've used articulating mounts before and have had problems with the pivot points, as any gap on the pivot point tends to cause the display to tilt or slant to one side.. perhaps something you might want to consider in your project.


Some of the better articulating mounts have a corrective leveling mechanism that will compensate to either direction up to 4 degrees of slant..


Best of luck with the project.



Bryan

 

[zhe zhang]

Actually, the arm was built in Mid February, and has been in use ever since. Everything is good. The only thing could be improved is there should be a little bit more friction in the two pivot points.


I looked at the articulating mounts on display at our local Good Guys. Each of the three pivots are about 3" long, therefore needs a very tight control for the clearance.


In my mount, I used only two pivots. They are two 1/2" bolts. The pivots are designed to be quite long (6.3" in front, 7.8" in the rear) and the clearance was controlled to be about 10mil (0.25mm). For a 6" bolt, even a 20mil (0.5mm) clearance causes only a 1/8" per yard tilt which is not quite noticeable.