Girder Phone Stand Updates!

Hi, wonderful people!

The Girder Phone Stand is now 87.5% cooler with the addition of an adjustable shelf, and it requires no reprinting of the existing parts beyond replacing the upper bolt with a longer one!  There are two versions, too - one for Apple MagSafe and one for everything else (and that one has an allowance for a cable to be plugged in to the phone)

Why an adjustable shelf?

It turns out that a lot of iPhone cases allow MagSafe charging, but reduce the strength of the magnetic attraction, meaning the phone won't just magnetically cling to the charger.  An adjustable shelf fixes that! 

The shelf does of course need to be adjustable so that the phone can be placed in exactly the right position for the charger to operate.

Avoiding reprinting parts

I wanted to add a shelf that would securely connect to the existing stand without necessitating a reprint of the main phone mount part, if possible, mostly out of a sense of challenge.  It was almost certainly for the best, though - if I'd merely altered the existing design I'd likely not have come up with a shelf design that was as much fun :)

Oh, that said, if you do want to use the adjustable shelf with the flat mount you'll probably want to print the new flat mount to go with it, since the existing version has a built-in shelf already.  I mean, you could cut those bits off, I guess...

Parts and assembly

So we have the following parts: (MagSafe version shown, but the flat mount is much the same)

There's...

1.  a new, longer bolt, 

2. a tab-aligned washer with protruding bumps, 

3. an adjustable shelf with a strip of grooves that match those bumps, and 

4. a nut to hold it all in place.

It's just cooler!

Even if you don't need the shelf, it definitely makes the stand look more mechanical and complicated, and isn't that ultimately what's important in a phone stand?  Right?  Right!

File Locations

All these new parts are under the existing folder at 719 Girder Phone Stand

Underneth that folder, though, there are two sub-folders, depending on which version you need for your particular phone.

Further thoughts

Thank you to everyone who gave such great feedback on this design!  It's ended up much better as a result :)  The conversations, requests, suggestions and enthusiasm in our little community is just amazing, and it's a constant inspiration and motivation! 

xoxo

Sven