All those beautiful adverts you see for controllers and music gear always show the shiny devices floating freely in a wonderland of white space and light. Once you actually get the thing home you’re faced with using it in on a real-life table filled with cables, cups of tea and other pieces of electronic junk. I like to keep my laptop front and center instead of to the side, so mixing involved a lot of leaning over a table for extended amounts of time. There had to be a better way, so I started looking around for the ultimate laptop stand.
SpaceTek and Odyssey have wonderful products that clamp to tables and lovingly present your computer in a robot embrace for $200 or so, and Stanton has the solid, portable Uberstand for just $69.
But I’m a cheapskate, and that’s when I found the “instructible stand”:
Why buy an expensive stand you’ll have to dismantle to lug between work and home every day, when you can make several stands for less than the price of a movie ticket. With two 3-foot lengths of pipe, six 90-degree bends and two T-joints, a bit of measuring and cutting with a PVC pipe cutter I borrowed, the stand just slots together and is instantly ready for use – no glue needed (unless you’re looking for an excuse to inhale the sweet, sweet fumes). The structural weakness in the design is lateral, so as long as you don’t try to push the laptop sideways you’re fine. Add a couple of strategically placed strips of rubberized skateboard grip to stop your laptop from sliding and you have a solid stand for next to nothing. I find mixing with the screen at face level so much better than beside the controller or with the screen way back in the distance. Try it once and you won’t want to go back.
– Fatlimey
Editors note: Robin’s great post excellently fills the need for an inexpensive backup stand. If you have other suggestions, ideas, or articles that would also be good for dj tech tools dont hesitate to send them to me directly: ean at eangolden.com
Other Laptop Stand Hacks
While we are on the subject of laptop stands check out this Life Hacker post about creating a laptop stand with door stops. Dj application? Can someone try to do this with 4 doorstops so a laptop could fit securely on an uncovered turntable? Random idea that just might work really well.
The blog sphere apparently contains everything including a site dedicated to hacking Ikea products. They have posted several ways to get interesting laptops stands for very little cash in this article.
One of readers created this interesting way of putting a large cover on a turntable that holds all kinds of gear.
Another reader took the cheapskate laptop stand and made it even better:
