I am looking to put a TV on the wall in my loft. The walls are your usual plaster board but when it was done I got the builders to put a wooden sheet behind so it reinforced it incase want to put something on the wall and drill through.
Can anyone recommend a suitable mount for a 43" TV? I want it to be flush on the wall. Just need basic adjustments when watching from the bed.
Would something like
this be enough? or do I need dual arms like
this ?
With the wood being behind the wall do I need any special screws or plugs?
Thanks
Either of those brackets would be fine. The double-arm one at £49 spreads the load over a wider area on the wall. That's no bad thing.
Regarding the wall, roughly speaking there are three typical construction methods. (1) Bare plaster over brick - which we know you don't have, so we can forget about this one. (2) A
stud wall - (see linked image) - these are used mostly as internal dividing walls between two rooms, but also useful in creating the
space for insulation over a bare brick/blockwork wall. (3)
Dot-n-Dab /
Dry Lined / Dry Lining wall - two sides of the same coin, but in essence some supporting method for securing plasterboard is fixed to the wall; this could be wet adhesive or some sort of wooden or metal framing. The plasterboard is then secured directly to that.
Depending on what your builders did and the type of wall then how you fix the bracket could involve simply drilling through the plasterboard straight in to the wood behind (usually
OSB which is an engineered timber product made from large wooden chips and glue compressed together to form a flat sheet), when you carry on drilling you'll either hit solid brick/dried adhesive blobs (a bugger to drill in to) or possibly a gap between the back of the board and the wall behind. Another possibility - although less likely I hope - is the board fixed to the wall but then a gap between it and the plasterboard over the top because the whole wall has been drylined or Dot-n-Dabbed. The implication of that is there's no support directly behind the relatively weak plasterboard and so any fixing would require some kind of stand-off arrangement to transfer the bracket load directly to the board without putting pressure on the plasterboard facia. It's kind of like piling to support foundations where they drive support columns through a relatively soft top surface to a stronger bedrock below.
Unless you saw or agreed the construction of the wall so you know exactly what you're dealing with, then the best answer is to do a small test drilling to find out exactly what you're dealing with.
Where you have plasterboard directly over OSB and then a gap behind then you have at least two possible fixing choices. You can either use thick but relatively short woodscrews so they don't bottom out on the brick wall behind, or try a sprung toggle fixing depending on the amount of space between the back of the OSB and the wall proper behind.
Toggles are my least favourite solution though. Too fiddly. You have to fit them to the bracket first then offer up the whole lot together. They need a big gap to allow the toggle to go through and open. If you remove the bolt then the spring toggle drops of inside the wall. I'd go with decent screws straight in to the board. That's why you had the board put up.
Remember, you'll need cables up the wall for power and maybe signal too. You also mentioned about getting the TV mounted flush. That's not really going to happen. The small bracket has a 50mm stand-off, and the larger is 56mm. This doesn't take in to account the space that the cables will take up that have to reach far enough to allow the TV to be swung out but are going to get in the way when it's folded back.
