Introduction: Foldable Laptop Stand - Using Wooden Rulers

About: Hey there! Thank you for stopping by. I'm Adhith, a Mechanical Engineer from India. Looking for some unique & in depth articles on building DIY projects? Then, I have few stories on board. My works mainly invo…

Hello guys, hope you are fun having around your projects…

Today were are discussing a very simple and useful DIY project. It’s a simple foldable laptop stand using wooden rulers. The entire build requires only few components like wooden rulers, metal hinges and few screws. The processes are very simple and the entire project could be easily completed in few hours. It provides six different angle adjustments for the laptop and also the wooden construction provides a robust design. It could be folded inwards to attain a smaller form factor and thus provides easy storage in our backpacks. If you are looking for some cool DIY projects, then do check out my you tube channel and other instructables. So without further due, let’s get started.

Supplies

1) Rulers for the main structure are made from 30 cm Wooden ruler with a width of 3.5cm

2) Rulers for the pivot linkage are made from by cutting two 10cm sections from a 30 cm wooden ruler with a width of 2.8cm.

Note: the width of pivot linkage ruler should be lesser than that of the main structure ruler. that's why we have taken 2.8cm and 3.5cm wide rulers as mention above.

The screws used have a diameter 3.5mm and the length depends on your specification of ruler. So buy accordingly.

The hinges used are of 2.5cmX 2.1cm in dimension.

Step 1: Main Wooden Rulers

Gluing the rulers

The main ruler provides the structure for the Laptop stand. It’s make from eight 30cm wooden rulers. The rulers are glue fixed back to back to form 4 double side rulers. The paint coating at the rear are properly sanded off prior to the glue fixing process. Cloth hanging clips are used to apply pressure on the rulers during the glue curing process. Once it’s done, the clips could be removed and we could start working on the structure.

The bottom ruler

The bottom rulers consist of the angle adjustment screws. 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25cm positions of the ruler were drilled to fix the screws.

The top ruler

It consist of the hinge mechanism for fixing the section to the required angle. A separate single side ruler is cut at 10cm and fixed at 14cm of a double sided ruler using a metal hinge. This top ruler and the bottom are now joined at the end using another metal hinge and screws. The hinge should be fixed in such a way that the previous attachments should be faced inwards while folding the hinge. This completes the main frame work. We need two of these section for our structure.

Step 2: The Pivot Linkages

This section is made from a double sided 30cm ruler having much lesser width that the previous wooden ruler. By double sided I meant that its made by gluing two rulers back to back to form a single structure, just like the way we did before for the main structure. Two 10cm sections are cut from the ruler for our purpose. The edges of these two sections are drilled to accommodate the screws. One thing to note is that out of the 4 holes drilled, one hole should be smaller so that the screw would tightly fix in it. The other 3 holes should be loosely fit the screws. By doing this, we could get a pivot join by placing the loose hole section over the tight one and then screwing from the top. This completes the pivot section and two of these are needed for our purpose.

Step 3: Final Assembly

The two pivot sections are used to join the two previous structural ruler section at the middle. The pivot would fold inwards to reduce the form factor and thereby making it convenient to carry around.

4 plastic chair bushes are used at the bottom for proper ground contact.

Also two bushes are used in an upside manner (refer the video) to act as the end stop for the laptop.

The build is now complete. So what's your thought on this simple project? Let me know in the comment section below