Well, I had a few hours to tinker this weekend and I finally put this idea into action. I have a 19" LCD monitor, and a 5.1 channel speaker system. I plan on upgrading to a flex arm instead of the fixed base in the near future, and the problem I envisioned was this: "where the heck am I gonna mount this speaker so that it stays with the monitor when it swings around?" Initialy this wasn't an issue because my desk faced into a wall. Now I have a grand desk in a small room, and it occupies the better part of the center of the floor. Wall mounting is right out! After a few overly elaborate ideas involving sheetmetal and fabrication services, I settled on the following: Here's a few detail shots of the back: And the front: (notice the CAD drawing on the screen ) The screws on the back are M4 x .70 x 10mm, which are pretty standard for VESA100 compliant mountable LCDs. The speaker is held on by a pair of #8-32 x 3/8" screws capped with plastic knobs. The brackets themselves are 3/4" x 1/2" x 1/16" aluminum L-angle, cut to length and painted flat black. The brackets are facing the way that they are so that I could get both the panel and speaker screw holes in one piece--instead of trying to add a crossbar at the top for the speaker--and in theory to allow room for the swing arm mounting plate when it gets installed. All in all it took about 10 hours, start to finish, but a lot of that was waiting for the paint to dry. Tools used include: 8" drill press, carbide tipped drill bits, hand counterbore, hack saw, sand paper, metal files, tape measure and speed square, spring loaded punch (to mark hole centers!) and good old fashioned machine oil for drilling the alum. If I ever get the cash for a triple LCD setup, I plan to add a similar setup for the left and right speakers on the ends of the monitor bar.
The few shots that I took weren't very interesting, so I decided not to post them. If anyone would like to see them, I can post later...
