Wooden monitor frame?

[Rigby]

I picked up some TVs over the weekend and have stripped all the electronics & cases and tossed all that junk.  I'm about to order some universal chassis for them and turn them into arcade monitors.  Three of the tubes are in the 13"-14" range, one is a 20".  All are different sizes.

I have no metal working ability nor punches nor brakes nor shears, etc., to make proper metal frames.  I don't have a great deal of interest in getting them made.  Can I make them out of wood?  I don't see an issue, as long as I provide a grounding point that is clearly marked, for discharging the tube...  am I right about that?  It stands to reason that if I can protect the tube neck, and provide a grounding point, the material of the frame does not matter.

Is making wooden CRT frames a reasonable thing to do?

[mgb]

You can always get some angle steel at the hardware store and bolt pieces to the tube using the four corner bolts of the tube.
this will give you something for mounting into the cab.
you'll also need a method of fixing the chassis board in place

[Rigby]

This is an excellent solution and I thank you for providing it.  We'll see if it works.  I'm sure it'll work for the bottom portion of the frame where the electronics get mounted, but I'm not sure about the mounting shoulder flange things on the tube itself.  They're at the corners obviously and I'm not sure you can draw a straight line from the center of one hole to the center of the next without intersecting glass.  I have no way to shape the the metal to fit, and bending would go against the whole point of using angle iron in the first place.

Any other ideas?  I know I can make it work with wood, but somehow metal sounds to be the solution which would add the least amount of weight.

[mgb]

What about separate pieces at each corner, diagonally?

[Vigo]

I've seen wood frames used as modifications on commercial cabs a few times. It was mostly a piece of plywood with a monitor shaped hole in the middle and the monitor was in the hole and bolted through to it. It wasn't pretty, but it worked just fine. The plywood was always well fastened and plenty of support to keep it from warping, breaking or coming loose.

So yeah, I have seen wood used, and it worked fine.

[mgb]

Here's a good example of a wood monitor frame.
His method for the actual attachment if the frame to the cab looks a little flimsy but the frame looks good.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=119702.0

[Rigby]

That's a flat-screen tube but yes, that is probably what I'm going to do.  I have a very old, very burned out (in?) 19" monitor that is in terrible shape.  There's actually a virgin spot on the edge of the tube that looks like it's never even been hit with the electron guns, and is very light grey.  Everywhere else is brown.  The contrast makes it very easy to see just how bad the burnin is.

I have all these perfectly unburned TV tubes I want to make use of, and I need to mount them.  Going to start this way, methinks.  I had envisioned building an entire frame for them, so i could remove them with the frame, but I'm not sure how often I'm going to be doing that, so this way seems best.

[mgb]

Yeah, I guess it's all about how serviceable you need it to be.
I would think it'd be pretty seldom that you'd need to pull the whole monitor.

When I shoehorned my 27" into a normally 19" cabinet, I couldn't leave the whole frame intact because it stuck too far out the back. I hacked out the frame and remote mounted my chassis board on the cabinet side (inside)