Acrylic bending tool and laptop desk mount

Since lockdown in 2020, I’ve continued to work remotely, and sunk a fair bit of time and effort into optimising my home office setup.

One thing that has continued to be a pain is having my laptop on the desk.

I don’t use it has a laptop the majority of the time – is it is closed and I use external peripherals (monitor, keyboard, mouse, microphone and camera). But it continued to take desk space as I had nowhere else to put it.

I had this idea of creating a mount on the side of the desk for it, but couldn’t settle on a approach or material to use. Wood would be too bulky, metal would be overkill and block wifi signal, and so forth.

Plastic seemed like the best option, but it would be far too big to 3D print.

When researching methods for manipulating plastic sheets, I found this video by Youtuber Dietec for a home-built acrylic bending tool.

 

Truth be told, I followed the video pretty much to the letter, so there’s no point rehashing all the points that are made.

The only main difference is I added a couple of toggle clamps on the side, and am using a “Universal” laptop power supply instead of a bench top one.

Anyway, back to the laptop mount.

It’s very simple really, take a sheet of acrylic and bend it into a ‘J’ shape, attach it to the side of the desk, and add laptop.

The piece of acrylic was recovered from an old scrapped project, and was a bit on the short side, however this could be overcome by mounting it lower on the desk skirt.

The bending process seemed quite straightforward. I did notice some crackling in the corners of the bends, I believe this is because I got impatient and stepped through the voltage settings a bit quick, rather than give the material time to heat slowly – so that’s something to bear in mind for next time. I think that's also why there's a slight curve to the lip, as can be seen in the picture below.

Then a couple of screw holes were added (taking advantage of pre-existing holes from the previous project and just widening them), and then screwing it to the desk skirt.

The laptop in place on the mount, tucking nicely under the lip of the desk at the side. Sure it's not a perfect build, but it serves its purpose.

Desk Stationery Organiser with pin and chalk board sides

This project was a spur-of-the-moment "Pinterest request".

Without any prior planning, I was given a picture from Pinterest and asked "Can you make me something like this?"

The pin in question was this desk organiser:


I found some thin plywood offcuts that were roughly 2/3s to 3/4s of the length of a new pencil, so figured that was about the correct height.

The length of the offcuts was slightly longer - approx 9 1/2 inches. It seemed a bit too much to split into 2 4-and-something inch pots, so rather than cut it down and create waste, I'd make my desk organiser three pots of roughly 3 inches each.

For the width, I figured it would look best if the pots were square, so I found some other offcuts and cut them to 3 inches.

The end result is a three-pot desk organiser with pots of that are 3x3 inches by somewhere between 4 and 5 inches tall.

For the base, I cut a length of pallet wood and cut grooves along the position of each of the middle dividers, and in turn cut a short section of each divider, so that the dividers would sit in the grooves:


On one end I cut a finger groove, as sticky notes are a standard 3x3 inch square, so one of the pots could be used as a dispenser for them.

I took apart a 'corkboard' (which turned out to be a thin veneer of cork over cardboard, and glued this around one side and the back.
On the front (the sticky-note side) I took part of the cork veneer and glued it on - purely for aesthetic reasons.

On the other side I attached a thin, flat piece of hardboard coated in chalkboard paint (which according to the tin was supposed to also be magnetic, but in reality isn't.)

I re-purposed some of the old corkboards frame to create a neat border around it all, and it was done.

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy) on Nov 3, 2017 at 5:26am PDT