Rotation, eh?? Well it isn't actually built yet, but it's coming together.
Here's a PDF that kinda shows you what the plan is. (attached below)
See that cage up in
message 641074 above? That will have a few strategically placed bolt holes in the bottom, and will then sit on top of another piece of ply with one corner rounded off into a quarter-circle. The bolts will be fixed into that, and will poke through the holes in the cage baseplate to hold it in position; gravity will do the job of securing it in place, and I can just lift it straight out again when I need to move the cabinet.
(nb - I think the attached plans show the bolts pointing down, not up - but you get the idea)That intermediate base piece is secured to a lazy susan bearing (much like the
model L-120 here) with just the right amount of shim (about 40mm in my case) to bring the whole thing up so the tabletop glass is about an inch over the screen.
A 150mm diameter wheel (lawn mower spare!) will be mounted offset just enough to stick through a slot in the side wall of the cabinet, so I can spin it by hand. This will grab against the rounded corner of the baseplate to rotate it through 90°. Two bump stops (just some cabinet door catches attached to hunks of wood screwed into the base of the cab) will prevent any over-run and hold the screen in place at either extremity.
Assuming all this works out, I need to solve the small issue of the Earth's magnetic field playing silly buggers with the screen as it rotates. I intend to splice in a power switch for the monitor under the cabinet adjacent to the wheel. This is so I can power down the monitor and allow it the few seconds required to cause an auto-degauss when it gets juice again.
It would have been nice to make this hard-wired (ie. power only supplied when the screen is resting at either end of travel) but it was all getting too hard for me to bother with. The only 240V wiring I've done is nice easy safe stuff like putting plugs on power leads. Explaining to guests how to use a switch is not such a big deal so this was an easy compromise to make.
There are still issues with rotating setups that make it a real pain in the arse... the bezel situation is a ---smurfette---, plain and simple. You have to hack away at the monitor housing and/or increase the overall size of your case or settle for a smaller screen too - it has to have room to fit diagonally!
Something else I noticed in others' cabs is that if you want both horizontal and vertical to be exactly centred, you can't just whack the monitor case over the centre of your bearing; you need to centre the exact point under the middle of the screen. This added another 20cm or so for me since it now had an eccentric orbit, with the net effect of needing even MORE space for the diagonal. Not really an issue unless you're using a PC monitor, though. It's a picky thing, but the sort of thing I notice
Recommend you wait and see if I give up on rotation before embarking
wow - that was a hell of a post