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My dad, the late “great gadgeteer”, loved Velcro®. (Well, it was more of an obsession with him.) He used it to stick every gadget imaginable to any surface in his car or house. There wasn’t a single piece of electronic equipment he owned that did not have a piece of Velcro® attached or a patch of dried up glue where Velcro® had once been.

I do not exactly share my Dad’s love of the “hooks and loops”; however, I have been known to use it on occasion as I am frequently looking for ways to keep things in place on the car, boat, trailer or bike. The problem with Velcro is that it is hard to secure taller and heavier items without risking catastrophe.

I had been looking for a way to secure the TV on a counter top in our travel trailer for some time. Previously, I had the TV on a rotating base secured with (what else?) Velcro®. The Velcro® was just meant to keep the base from sliding around as I had some heavy straps that were hooked to hardware on the counter itself. The straps were taken off whenever we stopped for the night. One day we forgot to secure the straps the next morning and the TV ended up in the floor along with the counter top. (I guess the Velcro® did its job after all!)

We bought a new flat panel TV but, although this unit was much lighter than the CRT we had owned prior, I did not feel comfortable just holding it down with Velcro®. Additionally, there was also no good place to mount the LCD TV on the wall plus I still wanted to be able to use the TV outside the camper. I imagined all sorts of complicated arrangements to hold the TV down and still keep it portable but the hassle didn’t seem worth it.

During a trip to a nearby RV store for something else, I discovered a gadget that seemed to fit the bill perfectly, not only for this application but for many others I can think of. It is called the Thumb Lock® TV Grips™. The grips stick to the appliance and the tabletop using heavy-duty 3M™ two-sided adhesive tape and have a plastic strap and ratchet-type lock.

The website claims that this product was designed for the US Navy to secure high-tech equipment at sea and the package shows a picture of a guy holding a TV stuck to a piece plywood over his head as proof of the device’s holding power. I did not find this product to be as secure as advertised, however. Since my LCD TV is relatively light, I used the two corner installation as described in the package. I still used the old hold-down straps as a backup security measure.

After nearly 25 hours on the road, the adhesive holding Thumb Lock® to the table and the TV had begun to pull off. I guess there is a possibility that I didn’t make sure that the 3M™ adhesive had set well enough before tightening the straps; however, this still makes me doubt whether the adhesive is strong enough in the first place.

Despite this I like the product and will give it another try perhaps using the four corner installation, stronger adhesive or even the screw fix attachment. For those of us in the go with lots of gadget and electronics this product seems like a great solution for keeping things in place without drilling holes into expensive equipment. If I can figure out a way to keep things from becoming unglued, I could become as obsessed with Thumb Lock™ as my father was with Velcro®.