LED HDTV Flat Screen installation
This was an incredibly easy installation; mostly because a former owner had already removed the old CRT television set and installed an Audiovox tv in its place.
First photo shows the Audiovox in place. Since this was not HDTV and only received analog television (which are not being transmitted over-the-air any longer) we decided to remove it and replace it with a Sanyo 19" LED HDTV we bought at Walmart for $138. Even though I am old enough to remember being amazed at how big a 24-inch television set was in 1961, I thought that a 19" flat screen would be too small to be useful in the living area of our 1993 U225. I was wrong.
The previous owner (PO) had removed the laughably small original equipment television (maybe 10-inches) and simply put a piece of siding up to fill the hole and slant-screwed it into the wooden sides of the overhead compartment. The piece had a 1-1/2" hole cut into it to allow the passage of the associated wires. Then he had screwed a wall-mount flat screen bracket to the piece of siding and then installed the Audiovox. It was all surprisingly sturdy so I just decided to work with what I had.
The Audiovox installation had several shortcomings. The first was that it was essentially useless in the USA because the signals it was capable of receiving were no longer being transmitted. (I could have bought a converter box but that would have cost a significant percentage of the price of a new tv set.) The second major problem was that the Audiovox tv had extremely wide left and right margins which held the speakers and was so wide (even though the picture area was small) that it interfered with opening the left and right overhead cupboards... which was where I wanted to install the BluRay player and a small pure-sine inverter to drive everything.
The third problem was that you could see the crappy piece of siding from the pilot and co-pilot seats and this annoyed the DW to no end.
I disassembled the parts and took out the piece of siding. I decided to simply attach a nice piece of wood to the siding which would hide it completely and also extend the mounting bracket lower to accommodate the new HDTV. (Although they've standardized on wall mount attachments to the tv in terms of configuration, they put them higher or lower with no regard to whether there will be a roof somewhere.) No one locally sells walnut and even though we have a nice walnut tree in the yard of the lake house I decided to use poplar and stain it with a walnut stain instead of chopping down the tree. The squirrels will appreciate this decision!
So I cut the wood, used a router to round off the edges nicely and a hole saw to cut a matching 1-1/2 inch hole in an appropriate place (which turned out to be wrong... but I remedied that with a saber saw judiciously applied). Then I stained the piece of wood, my hands, a polypro coat, a table, the floor and my shoes with walnut stain and left it to dry.
The next day, having changed my clothes, I asked the DW (who had finally started speaking to me again - they are so sensitive about stains) if she would come give me a hand at installing the parts. I re-installed the piece of siding in the tv hole and then attached the newly-stained (and almost dry) wood to it. I then held up the brackets and asked the DW if that looked "even". I could have used the measuring tape but this seemed to be more expedient (and resulted in a small deviation from "correct" in the installation... but then that's how we know it was "hand finished", right?). Finally, with the DW holding the TV up (those things are amazingly heavy when you have to hold it in place while someone goes to the fridge for a soda) we got it all together. And it doesn't look all that bad, actually.
The drops of stain on my tennis shoes look remarkably like dried blood; this elicited a few strange looks from our neighbors but since the papers have not reported any incidents of serial killing and dismemberment in the area I suspect they've chosen to ignore it. I may have to stop waring my hockey mask to practice, however.
Craig
Topic: LED HDTV Flat Screen installation