Pretty as a Picture

What would Jules Verne do? Back in the day, a dynamic visual display would have been a stereoscope or some kind of nickelodeon. Neither of those options are exactly convenient for a computer monitor, not to mention the desk space required. I still need this computer to be usable.

I thought about using the oldest OLDEST television I could find but the really truly antique ones are worth a fortune and out of my league. All I can afford are some ugly 13" things from the 70's. LOL! Besides, I don't like to tear up real antiques when I can avoid it. They should be preserved.

The simple solution seemed to be a picture frame. Simple, flat, and it hangs on the wall. I can always have the screensaver display art.

I looked through the lumber department at the home center and found several nice mouldings. Most baseboards were way too simple. Most crown mouldings were way too busy and they also had beveled edges to fit against the wall and ceiling which would just get in the way and/or leave part of the plastic monitor visible. The only real picture frame moulding I found was simple and basic and just didn't scream "antique" at me.

When I think of an antique picture frame I think of a big thick gaudy busy heavily hand-carved monstrosity with gilded highlights. I found a chair rail moulding (they're flat on the back because they're meant to be horizontal in the center of the wall) that would work beautifully.

Here's the monitor I'm starting with. Boring, isn't it?

The woodworking involved should be pretty simple. There are three main pieces to making this frame work around the monitor (BLACK). The front is the moulding itself (BLUE). I need a spacer (PINK) a little thicker than the edge of the monitor, then a back piece that will wrap around the back side of the monitor (GREEN) to hold everything in place. Below is a cross-section diagram of how things will fit together:

In order for the screen to be completely visible while keeping the black plastic parts hidden, the moulding will need to be cut with extreme precision. The screen of my particular monitor is exactly 14 and 13/16 wide X 11 and 7/8 tall. It's a good thing I've made frames before. All you do is measure along the inside edge of the moulding, cut at a 45º angle with a really good miter saw, and let the outside edge measure itself. My moulding is 2 1/4 inches wide, and although I could calculate the outside edge of the frame, it's just too much a pain in the ass to do it right now. Sorry.

There is a trick to it if you need the repeating pattern in the moulding to match up at the corners. Since I haven't actually bought the moulding yet, we'll wait and see how that turns out. That's another ass-pain I might be able to avoid if I'm lucky.

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Here is a close-up view of the chair rail I'm using for my frame. There are going to be a few elements of Art Neuveau and the vine and leaf pattern will look good with that. This is a bare-wood view here; there will be stain and gold leaf when the frame is complete.

I used my trusty miter saw and very accurate measurements of my screen to cut the four sides of my picture frame. Here you see the pieces put together with wood glue. The back parts of the frame that will hold it onto the monitor will provide more strength and stability but for now glue is fine. I can't stress enough how useful a corner clamp is and also how important it is for the frame to lay absolutely flat while the glue dries. Fortunately mine turned out right the fist time. Here are front and back views.

Next, I did one last check to be sure it's exactly right. You know; measure twice, cut once.

Next comes the spacer. It needs to be as thick as the monitor and made to fit around the outside. The backset measurement is just as important as the screen measurement so the frame is centered. The top edge (the black plastic part) looks like 3/4 of an inch. I clamped a piece of scrap wood onto the back of the frame at 3/4" from the inside edge and put it up to see how well it hangs. At the point I'm only looking at the top and bottom of the screen. It needed a bit of adjusting so I just eye-balled it, making adjustments before tightening the clamps down all the way. Then I took it down carefully and used the scrap wood as a straight edge to draw a line where the spacer should be located.

We're really starting to get a preview of how the finished frame will look. Cool. :)

I've just been inspired to write a note about perspective. Right now the monitor is lower than my line of sight which means there's more black space at the bottom than at the top because I can look down into it. If it were higher than my eye-line, there would be more black at the top. Not wishing to be unhappy later, I'm centering the screen in the frame with centered perspective. That is, I'm hunching down a bit to get level with the middle of the screen and centering it there. This is a lot more reliable than simply measuring the plastic edge of the monitor.

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I'm back from Lowe's, where I found a piece of pre-cut wood that's just wide enough for the monitor thickness and just thick enough for a wood screw without showing behind the frame. (That would be 2" wide by 1" thick). This middle part that I've been calling the spacer is going to go all the way around (almost) and be permenantly attached to the frame. The back will be removable in case of repair, cleaning, tweaking, etc. If I ever want the monitor out of the frame it will only mean removing a few screws.

The reason the spacer won't quite go all the way around is because there are two built-in speakers in my monitor. Even though I have an antique radio reproduction to use for sound, I want to be able to split the sound and also have it come out of the monitor. The main reason for this is that I like to plug my MP3 player directly into the radio inputs. This usually means I have no computer sound while using the MP3 but if I split the signal I can have music and still get computer noises out of the monitor. There will be two gaps in the spacer along the bottom edge where the speakers are located so that the sound isn't muffled.

The spacer is a simple shadow box, held together at the corners by screws and wood glue, then glued and screwed to the back of the frame (making sure the screw points won't penetrate the front of the frame). The length of each side has to be perfect. We need a snug fit so the monitor can't slide around but without having to force the monitor into the frame either. In other words, a perfect fit, like so:

Back to the front side for a moment: I found some decorative corner pieces but I wasn't too sure I'd use them. I thought they might look weird, stuck on like they didn't belong there.

Once I held them up to the frame, I decided they were exceedingly cool! Not only do they cover the mitered corners but they just add texture and depth. I can't wait to stain and gild them.

Here they are attached. Looking back, I wish I'd stained everything before I got wild with the wood glue, but I'll work with it when the time comes.

The monitor controls have given me fits since I first got the idea to turn the monitor into framed art. There are five little buttons across the bottom of the front. One idea I had was to make them hidden and have a fold-down section of wood to conceal them. That would make edge lines and generally look like dog poo. So that idea went away.

The smallest knobs I could find (that I liked) were brass cabinet knobs but they were just slightly too big. If I lined them all up with the buttons behind them, they would touch each other. I did end up using one for the power button, but the four menu buttons had to be something else.

I looked around the hardware store and ended up in the lighting department where I found a repair kit that had very small little ridged threaded knobs. They're perfect. These knobs are small, brass, and since they play a lesser role to the power button it's perfectly fine that they're different. I hardly ever use the menu buttons. I bet you don't either. Once your monitor is set the way you like it, you leave them alone. The main objective here is that I didn't want to take the whole thing apart just to access the menu controls, so this is the solution.

It's too late to take pictues, but if you want to know how I got the buttons on there, here's a short story. If you don't care, you can skip this paragraph. With the frame removed, I stuck a laser level onto a cardboard box with somehting heavy in it. To adjust the height, I stacked CD cases and a couple pieces of junk mail under the box and adjusted the level until the laser line went straight through the center of the buttons. Next I stuck a piece of masking tape on the screen above the buttons and used a corner square to mark where the buttons were horizontally. I carefully put the frame back into place (it stays on better now that the top and bottom spacers are in place) being sure not to move the monitor. Just as hoped, I had a laser line on the wood to show where the buttons were and used the square against the marks I'd made on the tape. Where these intersected I made a dot with a marker. The holes were drilled just a bit bigger than the screws so they'd move freely. The screws were cut down so that there was still a little slack once the knobs were screwed on tightly. On the inside, the screw holes were countersunk so the screw heads can't push the buttons unless I want them to. After doing all this, the knobs sagged down a bit and I was unhappy. I had some sticky felt left over from when I put new felt on the bottom of an old chess set, so I cut little rectangles of felt and stuffed that in the holes, and it holds the screws up level quite nicely!

I found these little brass decorative pieces on eBay a while back so I got five of them. My idea with these was to put ONE thing on each computer component (monitor, keyboard, PC case, Printer, etc.) that was identical to draw the whole project together. The one on the monitor will go in the center of the top, which will provide a balance with the brass knobs on the bottom. This piece won't go on until after I've stained the wood, but I couldn't resist showing it to you now.

I meant to take some pictures of the staining and gold-leaf process but I got carried away and was finished before I knew it. I really wanted a picture of the frame stained but without gold leaf, but trust me, you didn't miss much. It just kept getting better and better. It looked like a million once it was stained. I stained and gold leafed a piece of scrap from when I made the frame, so I knew all along that gold leaf was a definite yes! Anyway, here's a shot of the finally finished front of the monitor!

I still have to finish the left and right sides and put a back on to hold the monitor in the frame. I still have to make some adjustments to the brass easel once I know exactly how thick the completed frame is going to be. But I finally feel like I did something. The front is in its final, finished form!

More coming soon!