Wall-Mounted PC: Progress!

The actual physical progress I have made is a monitor wall-mount made from battening and MDF.


See the monitor hanging magically with no visible support!

I made a frame for the back of the monitor from 3 pieces of 6mm MDF:

I knew the bolts I had could only go in so far before I hit resistance (presumably from the internal components).  As far in as I was confident tightening them would leave ~9mm gap.  So I figured 12mm of MDF would be fine.

WRONG.  It turns out you have far less wiggle-room on these things than I thought.

So I had to countersink them through the outer layer.  That gave me the fear though because the outer layer would be the only thing really holding the monitor onto the wall bracket.  So I decided to glue the layers together as well as having the bolts.  It took a couple of tries to get the countersinking to the right depth, but it got there!

And before I did anything else, I tested that the panel from the wall-bracket would actually slide into it.  I'm glad I checked, because I had screwed up positioning the holes in the strips contacting the monitor.  That meant I had to widen the hole in the wall panel before it would slide on.

I made the wall bracket from a piece of MDF screwed to battening to make it stand out from the wall.

I hate the walls of my workshop.  They're made of cinder blocks which just melt away from the drill like chocolate from a blowtorch.  The mortar between the bricks is much more solid.  So the bottom screws go into rawl-plugs in the mortar, while the upper screws go into the cinder blocks (also with No-More-Nails just for good measure).

So that's the monitor part sorted.  Next step is the backboard for the motherboard and other bits.  I'm planning a similar board-on-battening approach, with the keyboard/mouse shelf fixed to the same battens.  We'll see if that plan survives the week.