Mounting a TV in the salon Cruising Corner Forums

We finally mounted the LCD on the boat using a VESA wall arm mount. Prior to that it was sitting on the cabinate top in the starboard forward part of the salon on a mount that fit behind the fiddle boards there. It was allways in the way there and if you went sailing you needed to take it down and set it up in the vberth so it was safe from falling over.

As you can see it takes up a fair ammount of the countertop as well as blocking the shelves.

Here is a close of up the mount the original owners built to put a tv on. At least I assume it was a tv they mounted on it. Underneath the top of the mount are some boards screwed on that fit behind the fiddle to hold it in place.

I wanted to get the LCD tv that came with the boat moved from this location so I took a swing arm VESA wall mount that I had sitting in my office and we bolted it to the bulkhead in the forward port side of the salon.

I mounted it so that we could swing it to either side at full extension on the arm and adjust the angle of viewing so the TV could point just about anywhere in the salon.

Here is a close up of the mount. We used two stainless carraige bolts to mount it. In the head you can just see the heads of the round heads carraige bolts and it looks very nice. From the picture below you can see that the stainless bolts were a little long.. I still have to take a hacksaw and trim the bolts off or just get some shorter bolts to replace these.

So far it works great. The only thing you have to make sure of is that you lock it down with a bunji cord so that the TV doesn't swing when sailing or in a wake. My next project for this is to run some cable conduit and neaten up the power and cable cords.

We use this as a tv and as a computer monitor. Though I have to say that as a computer monitor the quality is lacking. This is not a HD unit with the higher resolutins.

Total cost for this project was about 28 dollars. I got the Vesa mount at a flea market for 25 dollars and I think the bolts and nuts were just a little over 2 dollars..
Total time about 2 hours to dig up the parts and buy some bolts 🙁 and about 30 minutes deciding exactly where to drill and then drilling and mounting it.