Since I didn't have enough going on this spring I made some phone stands. This is such an easy/simple project it went quick and I didn't get a lot of photos of the construction.
These were the prototypes... I was working from a plan but I wanted to figure out how to make them quickly and safely.
The faces were pretty easy. I just milled the wood down the right thickness and ripped it to length. After that it was just a matter of marking where to drill the hole for the cord cutout on the bottom, trimming the slot on the band saw and rounding the top corners over with a template and a router bit.
The curved back was actually a little more of a challenge. I created a template out of 1/4" plywood, used it to trace a shape, then rough cut them on the band saw. I then tried using the template and a spiral compression router bit to remove the excess wood but the end grain kept grabbing and making it dangerous.
Since I was in a hurry - and I wanted to keep my fingers - I instead used my stationary sander. It made a lot of dust but it went pretty quickly to sand each block to the line.
The only other steps were to cut little blocks to rest the phone on, routing a 1/8" round over on the back brace, and then lots of sanding to get all the milling and sanding marks off.
To be able to finish these quickly and so I could get finish on the bottom I drilled a hole in the bottom and attached a truss screw so I could hang them from my finishing tree with a loop of bank line.
In this case I used General Finishes water based polyurethane. I don't use a lot of water based poly so this was a good opportunity to practice. If you look closely at the above photo you can also see that I wrote the name of the wood on the bottom.
I know what each species is; however, since I am planning on giving these away as gifts I wanted the new owner to be able to know what they had.
And here they are with finish.
Left to right it is 4x soft maple, cherry, sapele, and cherry.
These plans came from Wood magazine and are available on their store.
All in all these were a fun one day project (not counting finishing). I'm a little disappointed in the quality of finish I got; however, it is good enough for a free gift. I'll probably make some more and see if I can refine my finishing technique on them.
