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Download this thingI love my new iPhone 6. It’s sleek, it’s thin, and it’s fast. But when I’m reading a book or a newspaper on it, I want to stand it up on the table in front of me while I eat my breakfast. Thanks to Autodesk’s free app 123D Design, I was able to create this simple and straightforward stand that both does the job easily – and tucks away into a pocket when it’s not in use.
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This walkthrough will explain the sequence of tasks involved in building this straightforward object. It won’t go into exhaustive detail about how each tool and each menu option works, since I’ve already covered that in a Getting Started guide, as well as in a guide to creating a bath plug and a simple pen topper. Check out both of those links if you want to know more about the detail of working with this remarkably powerful yet free desktop application.
Instead, I’m going to outline the steps I took to produce this object. It’s a very basic design, and prints in about 20 minutes, but it des the job for which it was intended and it is, I believe, the lightest and most convenient iPhone stand out there.
This was designed for the new, slim iPhone 6, but it’s easy to adapt the design so that it will take a thicker, older iPhone – or, indeed, just about any model of mobile phone, even those running Android. I’m not fussy.
1. Start with a box
Begin by sketching out a box that’s thin – I made this just 3mm thick – and 6 cm long by about 3 cm high. As with all objects created in 123D Design, it’s easy to customise it later:
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2. Round off the corners
I knew I’d want rounded corners on the stand, so I used the Fillet tool to round them straight away. I probably should have waited to the end to do this but I was too impatient, and I enjoy using this tool:
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3. Slope the edge
The stand needed to be thin at the front and taller at the back, to support the hinge, so after selecting the top edge I used the Tweak tool to rotate it down at an angle. I then needed to tweak the adjacent edge, as well, as it had rotated out of position:
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4. Make a copy
I made the object thinner by tweaking the upper face – after all, there was no need for it to be so thick. I then copied the object, pasted in a copy, and rotated it 180°, moving it so that it nearly touched the original:
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5. Make the cutouts
The iPhone is about 7mm thick, so I made a box 8mm wide (to allow a bit of wiggle), over to one side. I made it 8mm all round, for convenience:
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6. Rotate and position the cutout
I rotated the cutout 30°, so that it would more or less follow the direction of the iPhone when the stand was folded. This was just a guess; as it turned out, the stand was so thin it didn’t make that much difference:
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7. Duplicate the cutout
I copied and pasted the cutout box and rotated it 60° the other way, moving it into position so that it mirrored the original on the other side of the stand:
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8. Cut out the cutouts
I used 123D Design’s Cutout feature to remove each cube from the stand, one at a time. This resulted in exactly the cutouts I wanted:
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9. Add a hinge
I toyed with the idea of making a complex hinge, then figured that if I simply made a thin enough join it would probably bend of its own accord. I started with a thin box, just 0.5mm thick. I dragged this so it sat flat on the ground, between the two arms of the stand:
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10. Er… that’s it
And that’s all there was to it. Here’s the finished stand, as printed:
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And here it is folded in half, ready to receive the iPhone:
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