DIY iPad stand

After returning from America in May with an iPad I hit an immediate snag: how will it stay in position on my desk? I hadn’t picked up the Apple dock with the iPad and it wasn’t available in the UK for a couple of weeks. Time to improvise. The first thought was to use a plate stand as these are very cheap, but the ones I found didn’t look very stable. Not a good idea for a $600 gadget.

The next step was to improvise, and since I work as an engineer my workshop has a scrap bin full of useful materials. I cut two identical shapes from offcuts of 6mm clear acrylic, following a template drawn in Microsoft Word. These were joined together by two 130mm lengths of 10mm diameter nylon rod, with screws to hold it all together. Total build time was around an hour, and to finish off the edges of the acrylic I used 6mm wide strips of 1mm thick sticky back neoprene rubber sheet.

I’m very pleased with the way the stand looks, and it’s just the right size to hold the iPad in either portrait or landscape with the docking cable plugged in. Here’s two more photo’s of the stand, followed by the template I used for anyone who wants to make one themselves. Print the template to cover a whole A4 sheet and the dimensions should be correct.