Last year I designed and built an unusual integrated center channel speaker and TV stand. This year I am trying to take my HT upward a notch since I finally got my 2nd DIY projector up and running.

I will post a solid model of the new enhanced design as well as some digital photos of the existing set-up. This design was conceived as a way to keep the old CRT TV integrated into the system but allow the manual pull-down screen for the DIY projector to be pulled down in front of the TV when watching big screen movies.

The black speaker table is already finished and I will be working on the bottom frame in the next few weeks or days. The purpose of this design is to get the TV up higher where it is in a better position for viewing, to get the center channel speaker oriented in an ideal vertial position and to lift up the speaker high enough so that when the big screen is pulled down the center channel speaker is very close to the bottom of the screen but as near to ear level as possible. It also gives me a couple of extra shelves to put things on like remotes or a PS3, etc.

Just a couple of updates and some pictures. It was really cold today but I spent the day outside at 20 F welding up some things. Here is a picture of some speaker stands that I am building. These are only going to be temporary and then I will give them to my sister and brother in law to use.

If you have a welder this is a cheap way to make really high quality speaker stands. I use 4, 5, or 6 inch square tubing. These are end cuts from other structural projects and the metal supplier sells them as surplus at 40 cents a pound. They alway have several around and depending on how tall I need and what I want to spend I buy accordingly since the cost is by the pound. The top and bottom plates are just pre cut square gussets that they have. The gussets are not sold by the pound since they are not considered surplus but they are still rather inexpensive. All told the materials here is about 15 - 20 dollars.

You can drill a large hole in the top and fill them with dry sand if you want the last word in quality sound. I usually glue a piece of felt to the top and drill holes for adjustable screw mounts or just stick self adhesive rubber feet in the bottom corners.

Here is a picture of them added to the front HT setup. They are not as tall as I want them and I am thinking of building some kind of a heavy base to raise them an additional 4 - 8 inches. I gave my old stands to my sister for a christmas present with some old speakers that I had rebuilt. These new ones will get me by until I build my new speakers.

You can see the integrated center speaker TV stand in the picture. Sound quality is very high since the cabinet is massively over built.

You can see that I have a wire problem but bundling all the wires together reduces sound quality and picture quality. I just don't let it bother me as long as it doesn't get much worse than this.

A picture of the new center channel TV speaker stand frame. It is welded up and just needs a little grinding and clean up here and there. I now need to build the two shelves and stain them and then paint the frame.

I'll probably use Hammerite for the metal since I am lazy and don't have to use primer with it. By the way, the larger 2 inch square tubular uprights were also surplus steel but I had to cut them down to the right size. The smaller 1 inch tubular I had to buy but the price is not bad. 12 bucks for 20 feet. I alway like to have some extra around in case I need it for something.

Hezz, you should get your stuff powdercoated. I work for a metal fab company, and we have a powdercoat division. There are SO MANY nice finishes available, and it's tougher than paint. Probably my favorite finish is "Wrinkle Black", it's kind of a rough, matte black.

I don't know about other companies that do powdercoating, but I know a non-trivial amount of our business is from walk-ins that just want 1 bicycle frame or a set of wheels coated. Most companies would be happy to have the business from you, I'd think.

The only drawback is that you have to have a hole in the item to hang it, but if you drill a hole to fill them with sand like you talked about, you've got that already.

Nice work, by the way, and BRRR. It only got up to 15 here today.

Power coating would be really nice but I think that it would end up costing a lot more than I would want to spent on the stands. I really like the Hammerite and Rustoleum hammered finish paints on metal furniture. It looks really good and they have it in several colors.

Here is a picture of my best speaker stands. These are a couple of years old. Made from 3 inch square tubular and about 24 inches tall. It took me a while to get those angles cuts right since I only had a sawz-all. Now I have an inexpensive mitre saw that I have put a metal cutting cutoff blade in. I use it only on light material and if I'm careful I could maybe cut three inch stuff with it. The straight cut stands I usually don't even have to cut. These stands turned out really well. They are in the living room upstairs. And these little 6.5 inch Infinity speakers sound much better than you would think.

OK,

I've got the frame finished and painted. And I also got the shelves cut out. I decided to use laminated pine since it stays pretty staight, is reasonably strong and light and was reasonably inexpensive.

I've still got to round over the edges of the shelves and paint them. I also noticed that I never painted the bottom of the speaker/table since it was on the floor. But now that it is lifted up higher a small amount of unpainted MDF is showing. I'm going to clean that up when I paint the shelves.

Once I get a LCD HTDV I'm going to rework the top of the table/speaker so that it's surface reflects the geometry of the whole thing. Then it won't look so top heavy. Still it is doing the job that it is called to do.

Now as soon as it warms up a little outside I'm going to start getting on those new front speakers. These steel speaker stands will get some kind of a wood base. It's like some knarled hard wood or something. Like a big hand hewn piece of wood. That would cost a lot around here since there are few scrap hardwood trees.

For some reason the whole thing looks tilted and in real life it is off of level by a small amount but not nearly as much as these pictures make it seem. It must be the angle at which I'm taking the picture.