Well, I ordered those
Equators, and they get here in a couple days, and I can't be setting them on floor now, can I?
So I looked around at some other projects people had done and came up with my own twist on the perennial favorite DIY monitor stands.
Bill of Materials:
1 6' x 3/8" threaded rod
1 6' 4x4" vinyl fence post
2 3/8" carriage bolts
2 3/8" coupler nuts
4 washers
4 nuts
scrap 2x10" douglas fir (floor joist offcuts)
polyurethane varnish thinned with naphtha
self-adhesive wire management tabs with velcro strips
black vinyl dye (flat black
Duplicolor Vinyl & Fabric Coating, to be specific)
Total spend ~ $30-40 (I only had to buy the first two items)
So I cut my vinyl post on the table saw into two 36" uprights. Sprayed those black with the vinyl dye, and wound up with this:
I cut squares (a bit over 8") out of my doug fir scrap, but first I ran it through my thickness planer, just to make it look nicer (it had printing all over it and was fairly ugly.
I used a forstner bit in the drill press to put a 1-1/8" countersink hole in the center (approximately--my drill has only 4" throat). Then I drilled through the rest of the way with a bit a little bigger than 3/8" so the bolt would pass through. All four pieces the same (but I paid attention to top and bottom appearance).
I rounded the corners just slightly on the router table using a 1/8" radius bit. End grain edges first to minimize the tearout along the grain. I tidied up a little with a block plane where things didn't look as slick as I wanted them to.
Then about four coats of my homebrew wipe-on varnish (50-50 polyurethane and naphtha applied with an old t-shirt. The naphtha makes the varnish dry extremely fast, so four coats took all of 15 minutes to apply. No stain, I just wanted the grain to pop a little.
The carriage bolts were installed to give me a temporary handle to pick up my workpieces.
Then I selected my top-bottom pairs
Here's a closeup of the edge treatment. You can sand this or do it with a block plane, I just happened to still have the router table set up from the last project. I just wanted the sharp edges broken.
Then it just came to final assembly. It doesn't take much imagination to put these parts together, however, my threaded rod was not long enough to go full height. So instead of buying another piece, I used a couple short carriage bolts and the coupler nuts to extend my rod a few inches (quiet in the back).
An added bonus is that I had the room to put a washer and nut holding the carriage bolt snug in the bottom plate before I put the coupler nut and long threaded rod on. So the rod didn't flop around like it would with no tension on it.
Going through the hole, from bottom up, it's carriage bolt, washer, nut, coupler nut, then threaded rod.
Then the post slips over that, line it up by eye and put the top plate on the threaded rod, and tighten down with washer and nut (using a socket wrench)
repeat the assembly and you have a pair of stands.
Mine are 39" high--36" posts plus 3" from the thickness of the top and bottom plates.
The wire management tabs were left over from some install at work, I just picked them out of the trash bin. One at top and bottom of the back side of each upright.
And velcro to gather up the cable and keep it out of sight and out from under foot.
Now, the technical part:
These absolutely should be filled with sand or cat litter or something else to contribute mass and dampen ringing. And because I can pop them right apart, I will be filling them as soon as I get enough old socks gathered and washed to hold my ballast. I have a couple five gallon buckets of aquarium gravel sitting around that is clean and won't mess up my room if it gets out the way sand would. That will get packed into socks and installed in the posts.
Concrete blocks on the floor work great, I know. I totally didn't want to look at them though. That was worth the 30 bucks to me plus the one evening effort to build these. I considered mixing up a bag of quikcrete and pouring it into the posts (not filling them though). I still may go that way. I hadn't figured out the trick with the nut on the carriage bolt before I gave up on the concrete fill. With that trick, you could build a temporary, narrow top plate to keep tension on the rod while you poured the concrete in, so the rod gets set in concrete at the right angle (kind of a big deal) and doesn't leak out the bottom end (bigger deal).
The tops won't show when these are in use, but the fronts will, so I chose to have that striking end grain showing forward on both tops and bottoms:
Thanks for your time.