iPhone, iPad, Smart Phone Acrylic Stand with Living Hinge

[Greg Bednar]

I found this stand from OxyJin on the LaserCutter blog and liked it. OxyJin also posted on ThingiVerse dot com. It was made from wood, which was nice but with my setup tended to crack and break the cut lines, which is what OxyJin alluded to in his post. So I redesigned the line cuts in the stand to make it suitable for acrylic and made the cuts with a 40Watt Epilog - 1/8" Cell Cast Acrylic - 2" focal length meniscus lens - vector settings are 16/100/5000 with air assist.

The file is saved in version 12.

[Frank Corker]

Very nice job Greg

[James & Zelma Litzmann]

Neat, thanks for sharing.

[Michael Kowalczyk]

Hey Greg,
What's up with this? No Droids allowed? just kidding :D
Thanks for sharing

[Anthony Welch]

Good work Greg. Inspirational!

Anthony

[Jin Lin]

Hey this is OxyJin. Good job on making an alternative.

[Ruben Salcedo]

Very nice design Jin.


Ruben

[Greg Bednar]

@Jin - glad you got my message. We like the way the thing fits into a pocket. Great item to set the smart phone on aboard a plane tray table. DHS doesn't mind it either. It is also useful on a conference table during meetings.

Thanks for the idea and welcome to the forum.

[Jin Lin]

@ Greg - I actually made a acrylic version with fewer cuts. I just changed all the rectangle cuts to a single center-line. The front small bracket does feel a bit stiff. I noticed that your cut lines are not centered. Is that a optimized living hinge cut line pattern that you use? I am still new to working with acrylic.

Also I would like to point out that the design is licensed under Attribution - Non-Commercial - Share Alike license.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

Thank you,
Jin

[Greg Bednar]

My single line cuts are pulled away from the edge so there will be a bend and not a clean break if overstressed a little. I don't understand what you mean by optimized living hinge. Perhaps you can enlighten me.

You are correct. The cut lines are not centered. Centering the lines allow for a more free flexing of the material. With the lines asymmetrical there is flexing with more resistance which allows the hinge to return to the closed position after use and somewhat delays a "memory" of the plastic, if you will.

Eventually the hinge will fail. This just delays it a bit longer. I should have run the cut lines even more erratic but you have to draw a line somewhere ( no pun intended.)

[Jin Lin]

Greg-You answered my question in your post. I was thinking that you have a pre-made cut line pattern that you "optimized" for making hinges. The off center cut on the stand was a result of copy and pasting the cut line pattern. Thanks for sharing the whole asymmetrical cut and delay memory of the plastic explanation.

[Greg Bednar]

Well take it with a grain of salt. There's an old saying " If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS" - but this is not hard science on my part but trial and error from other projects I've done. In short, the lines are not centered but are not centered because of my weird logic and my wanting to make the flex part last longer. The more cuts and the longer they are weakens the piece. It is not aesthetically pleasing, but is functionally sound. The piece will not be as rigid with longer cut lines. And I took the entire piece into consideration not just the cut lines. Do a couple or three pieces with different cut lines at different places and you will see/feel the difference.

You can center the lines, but make sure every other one makes an edge cut. The single cuts should work on your wood too, just make more cuts and a little closer together.

Well enough for now. We'll just have fun with it.