Bought online an Acer 27" monitor (XV270P) and a North Bayou dual monitor mount (F160) from a shop my company uses. Got them delivered to my house on Tuesday.
I did my homework verifying the two are VESA compliant before the purchase. According to the shop website they are, but when I tried to attach the monitor to the mount, they do not fit.
The mounting plate of F160 is slightly larger than the mounting cut-out section on the XV270P monitor. I don't know whether it's Acer or NB who screwed up, not following VESA specifications or has horrible tolerance control, but the end result for customer is two incompatible items.
Thought about a few ways to resolve the issue before I went to bed on Tuesday night, it's a mechanical problem after all. But none of my potential solutions is elegant, and these are brand new items that are supposed to work.
So I contacted the shop's customer support on Wednesday, who asked me to bring the items to the nearest outlet for their technician to check and resolve.
I did, and what a waste of time and effort that was.
The so called technicians are basically the people manning the till, nothing wrong with that, people can have the technical know how and skill for repair while still be the cashier.
The first alarm bell that went off inside me was when I told them I bought these and had problem, the immediate response from the 'technician' was "we can't help you."
I told them I bought these online from your shop and I contacted customer service who told me to bring them in to the nearest outlet.
The next alarm bell was that the only troubleshooting source they referred to was a video posted by someone who bought the same mount and monitor. A famous YouTuber, they said, as if that is a quality assurance or something...
The video clearly showed the YouTuber having problem attaching the monitor to the mount, but eventually got it to work, but the detail of how the YouTuber did it was not clear.
The 'technician' then claimed we just have to rotate the mount 90 degree and hold the monitor with just two screws instead of four as designed. The thing is, no two screw holes on the monitor are aligned with the 90 degree rotated mounting plate, I showed this to the 'technician' who then went back to watching the video all over again.
His next claim has merit because it's one of the solutions I thought of the day before: use something to elevate the cut-out section so the mounting plate does not have to go into the too small cut-out section, hence no interference.
My idea is to use washers (easy), or a 3D printed piece of that cut-out section (nicer), and get longer screws of same diameter and thread pitch. His solution however, only involved the first part (he suggested using nuts), and no matter how I explained, he couldn't get it that we need longer screws.
That was the third alarm bell. He insisted on trying with the existing screws, I indulged him and waited to see him fail, which of course he did. Some people only learn the hard way.
The fourth alarm bell went off when he used a screwdriver too small for the screws, do these people no know about stripped screw?
Anyway, he ran out of ideas after that, the YouTube video no longer gave him any inspiration so he raised the white flag and said the YouTuber probably forced and deformed something.
To be honest by that point I already knew I would get no help from the so call technician and customer support, so I cut my wasted time short and came home.
I filed down the mounting plate that evening, just needed to take off a couple of millimetres, I did it on three edges to get some leeway for centring the screw holes. Didn't have black paint at home so I sprayed on some clear paint, hopefully the filed areas will not rust.
Not pretty but got the job done.
Not sure if other Acer monitors have the same mounting section, but those who think of getting Acer XV270P monitor and planning to mount it on the NB F160 dual monitor mount, then let me tell you they don't fit.
And no I didn't make a video of my fix to post on YouTube.
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