This is a story. About a man named Jed.
No, Wait! That's a different story...
This story is about mounting my new WQHD Asus PA328QV 32" monitor
on the Ergotech Heavy Duty (HD) Freedom Arm
Motivation: The monitor is about 16.5" tall. The supplied stand
allows about 5" of height adjustment, with the lowest setting putting the bottom of the monitor about 3" from the desk and the top about 19" from the top of the desk. With an under-desk keyboard tray limiting the height I can raise my chair relative to the top of the desk, let's see... take the square root, mumble mumble, divide by pi log epsilon squared... add my height, mumble mumble ... I calculate I will be able to look at the new monitor for about 30 seconds before my neck spasms and yanks my head back locking me into a position that will prevent me from ever seeing my feet again. So I need to move the monitor lower than the stand allows, and easily reposition it from time to time.
I've used the non-heavy duty version of the Erogtech Freedom Arm (holds up to 17 lbs) for my 24" Asus PA248 monitors and really liked it, but the new monitor was supposedly too heavy (25.3 lbs.) for that arm (more on this later). The HD version of the arm has a heavier spring to accommodate monitors weighing up to 30.8 lbs. Technically, the arm only accommodates 27" monitors, but some reviewers used it for 34" monitors with no issues. So I ordered it.
The VESA mount on the arm
but the size of the VESA mount is larger than the cutout area on the back of the monitor. So I have to use spacers supplied with the arm to sit between the mount holes on the monitor and the mount holes on the arm. Spacers are 5mm and 10mm high. With the PA monitors, I need to combine a 10mm+5mm spacer for each hole to mount the arm. (One 10mm spacer is enough to clear the cutout, but the screws provided with the arm are either 1cm or 3 cm long. The 1 cm screws aren't long enough, but the 3 cm screws will bottom out unless I use 15 mm of spacers.)
I did this on the smaller monitors and the previous arm with no problem. Should be the same procedure this time.
And that's when the trouble started...