8311 Front TV upgraded

[Zogman]

Hi Guys, I thought I would share my latest project. I have an 02 8311 that had a beefy 19" TV up front. Unlike many of you, I rarely use hook-ups. Most of our camping is in the desert where we ride or at So. Cal State Beaches and we never get hook-ups there. Our dilema was that we could not watch TV after quiet time. I don't have the means to install a beefy invertor right now so I thought if I could replace the main TV with an AC/DC TV, I could watch the tube later in the evening. The 8311 is prolly one of the smallest NRV coachs so my original TV is rather small and does not have a large cabinet for me to put a large flat screen.

I found a nice 22" HD flat panel that was AC/DC that had a built in DVD player on Ebay. After removing the orginal TV, I screwed in a deck for the flat panel to sit on outside of the original cabinet. I made a cross brace that would act as a back support. I purchased a Flat panel TV mount that normally would mount sideways to swivel the TV side to side while mounted to a wall. I mounted mine rotated 90 degrees so it would act as a telescoping device to retract the TV away from teh cabinet.

I then mounted some velcrow to the bottom and rear of the TV to temprorarliy secure the TV while a new exterior cabinet is installed to secure the TV to the main cabinet. I have to say it turned out great. I found a live 12V wire in the cabinet and tied into it and ran a ground up to the antenna. There is a slot in the side of the face mount that allows access to the DVD player.

I'll add some pictures in my next post to show you how I did it.

[Zogman]

Here are the in process pictures

[Zogman]

So here are the rest of the pictures. As you can see I put some high density foam on the inside of the new cabinet and after screwing the cabinet in, the TV is firmly secured. The mother of the job was getting the 4 screws drilled into the correct position on the main cabinet. I don't have the caps in the holes yet but I have some dress caps to clean up the look. My brother in-law is handy with wood and I gave him my measurements and did a bang up job on fit & finnsih and getting the maple to match pretty darned good.

BTW, I have a small TV in the bedroom and I also put a 17" AC/DC flat panel there so we can watch TV in bed without a genny. Tied that one into the ceiling light and it works great.

Anyways, I hope this helps anyone out there with an 8311.
Cheers
Z

[Vegasdan]

Very well done!