Wooden Speaker Mounts

This weekend I made a set of speaker mounts out of plywood, a bunch of bolts and nuts, and some knobs I made with the 3D printer.

It can be tilted in two axes.  It's certainly not the simplest way to design a speaker mount and it is a bit bulky, but that's all intentional.  I like the way it looks with the two knobs and the home-made look of the plywood.  I have other store bought speaker mounts that use a ball that rotates in three axes which is much simpler, but these are really hard to adjust.  Also, the third axis of rotation is not really necessary anyway.  With this mount is really easy to tilt the speakers by just loosening one of the knobs, tilt, then tighten again.  This project is also a bit of an experiment.

First I prototyped it in the computer to get an idea of the rough sizes of all the pieces I needed.  Since some of the wood parts that serve as rotation pivots are square instead of round, I wanted to make sure these pieces would be have the correct range of rotation without being obstructed by other parts.  It's very easy to model and simulate this in the computer.

This is the 'arm' of the mount.  I used a t-nut here to be able to tighten this first screw.  All is made out of 1/2 inch plywood.  I also used a screw to go across the back side of this arm to provide extra support on top of the carpenters glue.

This is the face plate that screws to the wall.  For this second screw, instead of a t-nut, I carved a hexagonal hole in the wood with a chisel and embedded the nut in it with a hammer.



And that's how it all looks put together.  I used the same 3D printed knobs I made for this project.  The finish here is terrible, there're some burn marks on one side of the face plate but I'll take it all apart and give it a sanding and a couple more coats of lacquer.