In today’s article we’ve pulled an old relic out from the archives, polished it off, and realized- hey this is still pretty good! Take a trip down memory lane as we explore several excellent options for DIY stands from yesterday and some new ones from today!
DIY LAPTOP STAND
By Robin Green
All those beautiful adverts you see for controllers and music gear always show the shiny devices floating freely in a wonderland of white space and light. Once you actually get the thing home you’re faced with using it in on a real-life table filled with cables, cups of tea and other pieces of electronic junk. I like to keep my laptop front and center instead of to the side, so mixing involved a lot of leaning over a table for extended amounts of time. There had to be a better way, so I started looking around for the ultimate laptop stand.
SpaceTek and Odyssey have wonderful products that clamp to tables and lovingly present your computer in a robot embrace for $200 or so, and Stanton has the solid, portable Uberstand for just $69. Of course, there’s also the ever-popular and supremely well-designed Crane Stand that we sell in the DJTT store.
But I’m a cheapskate, and that’s when I found the “instructible stand”:
Why buy an expensive stand you’ll have to dismantle to lug between work and home every day, when you can make several stands for less than the price of a movie ticket. With two 3-foot lengths of pipe, six 90-degree bends and two T-joints, a bit of measuring and cutting with a PVC pipe cutter I borrowed, the stand just slots together and is instantly ready for use – no glue needed (unless you’re looking for an excuse to inhale the sweet, sweet fumes). The structural weakness in the design is lateral, so as long as you don’t try to push the laptop sideways you’re fine. Add a couple of strategically placed strips of rubberized skateboard grip to stop your laptop from sliding and you have a solid stand for next to nothing. I find mixing with the screen at face level so much better than beside the controller or with the screen way back in the distance. Try it once and you won’t want to go back.
Other Laptop Stand Hacks
While we are on the subject of laptop stands check out this Life Hacker post on a variety of different DIY solutions for laptop elevation, including the below elevation with door stops. DJ application? Can someone try to do this with 4 doorstops so a laptop could fit securely on an uncovered turntable? Random idea that just might work really well.
The blogosphere apparently contains everything including a site dedicated to hacking IKEA products. They have posted several ways to get interesting laptop stands for very little cash in this article.
Another reader took the cheapskate laptop stand and made it even better:
Here’s a clever use of cardboard – perhaps not as smart in a club where wet surfaces are common, but still a strong source of inspiration. See the full post on the stand here.
Perhaps table space is at such a premium that you can’t even fit a laptop stand on the table – so why not bring along your own DIY height adjustable laptop stand made out of a tripod? See the full steps for this clever mod.
Do you have some extra K’nex laying around the house? Me either, but if I did, I might be inclined to try and build this K’nex Laptop Macbook Uber Docking Stand.
Finally, we wanted to make sure to include only the lastest and greatest in laptop stand inventions, so be sure and check out the incredible design and entry level price point on this final stand.
