I needed to mount a television to the wall, but I didn't have a very important tool to monitor its straightness to the ground—a spirit level. And so I thought to improvise with a spirit level mobile app I found. Its performance did the trick, and here's how you can use it too.
To mount a TV to a wall, you need a wall bracket. And it is that wall bracket you actually work on and then fix TV to it. Some wall brackets come with a sprit level tube to make installing them simple. The one I had had nothing like that. In fact, it has two components to make up the rack, making it even harder to install.
I started by marking where I would like the rack to be on the wall with a pencil. From a single point where one of the screws would go, I aligned a long ruler on it and also rested it on the wall. Then I placed my phone on the ruler with the spirit level app open, adjusted the ruler till it was level with the ground, and drew a line across.
The line I drew across is where I'll drill the next holes for the rest of the screws for the part of the rack. I then repeated the same process for the holes on the other part of the rack.
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I placed the rack on the TV and took the dimensions for the positions of the screw holes and transferred them to the lines on the wall. And then I began drilling the holes.
I did not have a drill gun, so I had to improvise to create holes for the screw anchors. I started by creating small holes with small nails and then boring those holes with a much larger nail. When I was finished, I fit the anchors gently with a hammer.
One of the anchors couldn't go in as the many retries caused it to bend. The rack would still hold the TV anyway.
While I was boring the holes, I kept checking the spirit level on my phone to ensure that the entire rack would still be perfectly level with the ground. When I was done, I put the TV on it to complete its mounting. The result, however, was not perfect.
It may not be conspicuous to other people, but I could see that the TV was slightly tilted. I guess that the shift must have happened when I was boring the holes, which could have been avoided with a drill gun and the right drill bits.
Nevertheless, the spirit level app performed well, and I may not have been able to do the job right without it. I eventually found that we actually had the real thing somewhere in the house, but I think I would have gotten the same results anyway since I didn't have a drill gun. Now I think I really need to get myself a drill gun for this kind of situation. I surely cannot find a drill gun app.
All images belong to me