My fully motorised LCD mount on a track system. - Part 1
Concept
Whilst redecorating my living room and after fitting my new fire place the original idea of mounting it was not appropriate
to put a LCD over it.
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With the new fire, it would end up too high up the wall & would be too small.
So I decided to move the room around and put it on the wall between the living and dining room. But here was the problem.
This would not be in the middle of the room and would be difficult to view and spoil the surround sound.
Solution
Suspend the television on a track system which would allow it to be moved into the middle of the room when necessary.
These three pictures are my original concept room drawn with Paint shop pro. Samsung 46" or 52" was the choice of TV at that time.
The end result.
Design - initial concept
To enable the TV to be in the middle of the room I had to put it across the opening into the dining room. So rather than wall mounting it I thought I could hang it from the ceiling and move it on a track.
I have been sailing dinghy's for the past 30 years, and they use track systems to control the sails. The forces involved in sailing are huge, and thus the use of ropes tracks and pulleys are well suited to this project. With a LCD only weighing 35Kg the lightest of 'main sheet tracks' would do adequately, the weakest items I've used are the pulleys, with working loads of around 450Kg, breaking 850kg.
My initial design concept was to mimic the way a tower crane moves a load. A trolley with pulleys with all the control at one end done by winches. But after this was all built I ran in to the first major problem - friction.
This is the original design concept with winches to raise and move screen, counter balance weight to keep grip on the lifting winch, a pulley to change the length of the bottom suspension rope to provide tilt. - Do not copy this it will not work!
Pitfalls
Not actually having a LCD at build time and not wanting to experiment with the real thing my dining table top became my substitute screen and with the trouble to come it was a good job. The table top was an ideal substitute, weighing 40+ kg and larger then the real thing it gave me a good idea what I was dealing with.
The track was the easy part, two 4 foot lengths of Rwo Traveller Track, measuring 16mm by 19mm. Giving a total possible movement of 2.4 meters less the width of the mounting bracket, which was 600mm on the Samsung TVs.
I took the floor up upstairs, to find the best possible mounting. The floor joist for the upstairs bedrooms overlapped, giving a super strong mounting points and as the track is only 300 mm from the wall strength would not be a problem. But just in case I put in noggins between each joist. I think I made them just a bit too big as hammering them in cracked the plaster on the ceiling below.
This is a drawing of the noggins in between the joists (no photographs.) Joists in Yellow, noggins in Blue, ceiling in Gray and track in Black. I put in some brackets just in case, but these aren't needed if you get the noggin right.
By now you may have guessed that the mounting may be a bit of over kill, defiantly well over engineered. But when you are hanging a £2000 TV from your ceiling I guess you can't be too carefull.
After mounting the track the travellers (cars) were fitted. These were spaced by a spreader bar making the space between the two suspension points the same as the TVs mounting bracket.
The photograph above is the first attempt of a winching system which again failed.
After building this design, mounting the table top on a dummy frame with 4 separate pulleys attached to the frame and 4 pulleys on the track travelers. I secured the far end to the ceiling with an 'L' bracket, mounted the two more pulleys on the wall. The wall fitting of two 4" wall bolts and 'L' bracket, was again OTT, but they had to support the horizontal pull of the ropes, equivalent to the weight of the TV.
When it was done, I was able to lift the weight of the table top, reasonably easily. I could sort out the required purchase later. Four to one would give a 10Kg requirement to lift the TV.
But.... This is where it all went wrong. The problem friction.
Trying to move the table along meant rotating all 8 pulleys. Unwittingly and for cheapness I bought plain bearing pulleys, less than half the price of roller bearing blocks - I've now got loads of spares for my boat. With the weight of the load it was very hard to push, also depending on the direction of travel the front would climb the rope thus rotating either clockwise or anti-clockwise. What ever you did it would not sit square after moving. The main design had to be re-thought.
I built many different versions of systems in an attempt to winch the tv up and down. Hanging the TV directly from the travelers made movement side to side very easy, but in the original design the lifting was done by a winch mounted on the wall. I transferred this idea to the back of the mount. I was using two Toyota MR2 Mk1 window winder motors which I thought would do the job, but after weeks of re-building I came to the conclusion they wouldn't work. I built counter balances, enough lead so there would be next to no lifting force, but again this failed due to friction in the pulley system required to balance the screen.
Finally I fount the solution on the internet a Motorised Actuator which was capable of lifting 65kg and a piston length or 30 inches (760mm)
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Re: Fully motorised LCD mount on a track system - How it was done
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