Nifty Monitor and Speaker Mounts for Office

Thought this project was nifty enough to actually post something. Also it was a rare occasion of taking time to do something fun instead of something important and that's worth celebrating too.

I've wanted since I got my office to mount my three computer monitors on the wall, both to get them at a better height and to make my desk look cleaner. Also, the monitors and stand weigh quite a lot and it makes it hard to pull my desk away from the wall if I need to plug something in to the outlets back there. A good wall-mount triple monitor stand is very expensive, so I decided to incorporate my existing cheapo stand into a new configuration made for the wall.

The main component I needed was a big plate with mounting points that matched existing screw holes on the crossbar of the stand. I did the measurements and CAD to get the size and shape, and then a student who owed me for wasting a lot of my time made it up to me by using his waterjet skills to cut the plate out of 3/8" steel. I had another student clean it up and paint it for me. Ended up looking great, and I fixed it to the steel studs in the wall with very large self-tapping sheet metal screws on long spacers (otherwise you can't access the rear of the plate to tighten the crossbar onto it). Here's a picture of the plate fastened to the wall (I made the plate to match the stud locations and still center the monitors correctly over my desk). I wanted to be sure it would hold my monitors so I hung off it and it didn't budge at all - that ought to do it.



I also wanted to finally get some speakers on my office computer. I had some speakers from high school that were perfectly good on the inside but were totally beat up on the outside from being my main speakers until a year or two ago and enduring moving back and forth to college and to Japan and so on. I wanted to reuse those components rather than throwing them out, and I also wanted to suspend the speakers off the desk as well. I did some CAD work to design a new housing to fit them and ordered some flexible hollow metal tubing from Snakeclamp to run the wires through. I 3D printed the housings, shown below, and added hardware to hold the pieces together.



I had to cut and splice the cables a couple of times and ended up using a barrel jack on each line to make them a bit more modular. The plastic from the printers isn't quite nice enough to pass the "did you make that yourself?" test so I wanted to wrap them in fabric for a nicer finish. Tried a number of fabrics but had a hard time finding one stretchy enough to cover the housing and still be wrinkle free. Ended up going with black pantyhose - cheap and worked a treat.



Speakers mounted below monitors, floating above desk. The wires run inside the flexible supports for the speakers so they are 100% invisible. Doesn't sound as good as my newer system but they're about 20 years old, cost a fifth as much, and look pretty cool, so I'm going with it.



Overall view of final product for monitor wall mount conversion and floating speakers. Took me a good couple of years to get all this going and put together but I do like it.