Monitor/TV Stand and Carry Handle

At my office we are moving to an open layout with no assigned seating and I really need to have at least two screen to work efficiently. I wanted a way to easily transport a second screen back and forth from the office and maybe have a screen that's easy to transport for gaming as a bonus.

I tried looking at the options for portable screens online but they either rely on using USB DisplayLink, which doesn't work well on Linux or it hasn't worked well for me, or they are overpriced and low resolution.

Since I had this 24" monitor setting around, it's actually an LED TV but I'm not using the tuner, and it has a VESA mount on the back. I thought I would try making a more compact stand and add a way to easily carry the monitor. At 24" this monitor is really pretty big but the original stand was about as big as the screen. Which made the screen very awkward to carry.

My solution was to make a kickstand that folds out from the a carry handle and it's exactly what I needed.

I had this idea and wanted someway to at least try out the idea at a work. The pictures above show what I came up with in about an hour one night before work. To be fair, it does work fairly well and it's pretty thin. But it doesn't look very nice and it makes it a little harder to carry since it's just loose on the hinge.

After getting some measurements from the monitor and the kickstand I had already built. I sat down with the monitor in front of me and just worked through what I needed the stand to do and the most efficient way to do it.

I'll be honest, I got lucky and just knocked this design out on the first try. I know I'm not the first to do it but I already an idea what I wanted and just put it on paper with the measurements. I'm sure this could easily be adjusted to match other monitors with a math.

Since I took the time to figure out the lengths of each part ahead of time, I could just go out the the shop and just start cutting the parts.

I will say it's really good to make sure you layout the parts together if your cutting them all at once. It helped me catch that I cut one of the pieces too short and I just cut a new piece right away.

I then laid out the screws to figure out the size of the holes to drill into each piece. I didn't take pictures of how I did the holes so I'll have to describe the process.

Since I needed to allow the parts to swing around each other. I drill pilot holes in the parts that needed the screws fixed in place and then drilled holes large enough for the screw to spin freely in the ones that needed to move.

I then measured and drilled out the mounting holes. And almost as an after thought, I cut a piece of 1/8" steel rod and drilled a hole just large enough to fit. I did this to add stability when it's extended.

I mounted the stand to the monitor and tried it out for a while. I worked great, it was stable and easy to adjust and looks pretty good. The problem came when I tried using the handle to carry it. As you can see from the pictures, the monitor swung at a strange angle which made it hard to carry. Which really defeats the point. I figured the reason is because the bottom of the screen is heavier then the top and since it's hinged at the top it swung out like that. But this is really not a what I wanted. Back out to the shop to fix it.

To fix the issue with screen swinging out, I cut another 1/8" steel pin and drilled 2 holes on either side to lock the arms together when transporting. Since I added another pin to use for transporting, I drilled another hole to use the second pin to add extra stability when full extended.

Hope you this helps you with your own project. And remember to always admit and embrace your mistakes. They not only help you learn and grow but help others too.