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Two fine projects we are about to tell you about concern hanging our beautiful bright high-contrast, low-latency, multimedia-ready Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs) into their proper places in our ever-busy and cluttered workspaces. The goal is to achieve highest efficiency while expending as little money and time as humanely possible. And boy, do we succeed in reaching this goal!

Admit it, LCD screen on a standard pedestal takes way too much space on our desk. Our desks are small and increasingly cluttered, and Earth is not becoming any larger. The solution to this dilemma just might lie in a judiciously chosen LCD hanger that would unclutter at least a portion of the desk now uselessly occupied by the plastic stand. It looks like a great idea at first sight, but we all know too well - with computers the devil is in the details.

You can buy any number of LCD-hangers these days. Large and small, tilt and swivel, white, black, silver, arm and leg - they clutter virtual shopping malls and make it hard to make an informed choice, lest provide our cherished LCD with a more dignified support than a bland and clunky factory pedestal made of extruded ABC plastic.

There are several principal problems with any given LCD hanger:

1. It usually requires screwing something. Into the wall. Be it nuts, bolts, screws or quick release levers - it’s just too involved to be pleasantly entertaining.
2. It usually requires un-screwing something from the wall when it’s time to move. Since everybody is on the move in our dynamic lives - that means un-screwing often.
3. After LCD moved  - please, see 1 and, please, don’t forget to patch the old holes in the wall.
4. It costs too much money. Value for the buck is dismally low. Too low. 

We hear appeal for help and rush to the rescue!

  LCD hanging on paper clips.

For this LCD-mounting project we will need 2 large paperclips so beautifully impersonated in classic Microsoft Office series; a needle-nose pliers and a push-pin. Nothing more, nothing less, and of, course, an LCD screen. This technique works best with screens of smaller size, where value-for-money quotient has to be especially competitive. If you plan to do this with your new 50-inch plasma display, we reckon you have gone far past The Frontier Of Reason as well as Point Of Diminishing Returns and suggest you NOT to go ahead with this project. We bear absolutely NO responsibility if you follow this information and something goes Horribly Wrong. Following this advice may be harmful of fatal - you are responsible for the consequences. Having uttered this obligatory disclaimer, let’s continue with our project … 

Our object under duress will be a run-of-the-mill 15-inch LCD screen for which we absolutely, positively do not have space on our admittedly small desk.

Besides not having much space on the desk, we do not even have a wall on which to hang the display. The desk is equipped with a hutch that precludes access to the wall. Therefore, we cannot use conventional LCD wall mount, short of making a big hole in the desk’s decorative false wall. Making a hole would be undesirable if only for reasons of being irreversible and potentially disconcerting.

Therefore, we will resort to mounting our LCD directly on the hutch structure. After examining several possible ways, we decide to proceed with hanging onto the decorative wall surface. The wall is made of pressed paper pulp about 0.2 inch thick and is very sturdy, especially in the direction of the plane. It certainly can support the weight of the 15-inch LCD screen if the screen is hung as close to the surface as possible, thus distributing the weight in a downward direction of the plane with minimum sideways “bending” force component. With that much of a scientific preparation, it is now time to grab the paperclips.

In a fitting tribute to Steve Jobs and his array of colorful iMac computers we select from a rainbow pile of paperclips. We opted for a “moonlight mist silver”-colored pair of jumbo-sized clips, sturdy enough yet pliable to a required shape. Two pinhole openings in a cardboard wall of a desk hutch is all that is needed for our paperclip hooks to hold on. Holes are easily drilled with a push pin by pushing it through the cardboard and wiggling it until satisfied.

Looped end of each paperclip is attached to the LCD screen using existing screws in top corners of that particular model of a monitor. We did not test what might work for those supremely cost-effective models that lack screws in top corners and leave it as an interesting exercise to the reader. We then attached paperclip hooks to the wall via pre-drilled holes and connected the power and video cables. A good tug down on the monitor served as a final test of robusness. It passed with flying colors, surpassing feeling of immobility we experienced tugging on some commercial LCD monitor mounts.

Pictures show closeup of a corner mount. Paper clip is performing beautifully. Visible on the left side corner is a golden-colored thread of ritual significance.  

Summary

We successfully achieved our primary objective of hanging the 15-inch display onto the wall, thus maximizing space while minimizing investment and damage to the work environment.

This method of mounting LCD screen, while simple and efficient, may not be for everybody. In the next project we will tackle LCD mounting in a completely different, shall we say, fashion…

To be continued …