Synth stand

27 May 2019

Modular angled stand

I'm a little late, this is being posted Monday afternoon, rather than Monday morning.

I wanted a stand to raise the back of some of my synths/toys to make them more comfortable to use.

I've been working on this on and off for two weeks, trying an idea, printing, and then trying something different.

The main problem was designing something that would fit on a standard 3D printers bed, and still be big enough to work. Having something you could print separately and then join made the most sense.

First attempt

The first idea was to have the feet on the sides, supporting the item, and then raise the back up. For some reason the support beams seemed to squash during printing when they were full length (the test parts I did were short and didn’t have this problem) so the pegs didn’t fit reliably.

I was also a bit unsure that the stand might slip out backwards if the device was pushed in the wrong way, so I wanted something that wrapped around the front of the device as well.

The first failed attempt at the stand

Second attempt

This time I thought I’d try making something that was mostly flat, with just the feet raising it up. The idea was that this would be stronger than the beams and easier to print.

I came up with a clip that worked when flat, but any rotation caused it to separate. Adding three prongs stopped this and stopped the joint from folding.

However, for some reason when I designed the whole thing, I only put two clips in, and didn’t account for the weight of the parts themselves pulling down in the middle. It’s possible that adding the third clip on each of the parts would have fixed this, but I still wasn’t sure it would work and didn’t want to re-print everything.

I did think of adding a foot that clipped around the existing parts, but that didn’t seem a very neat solution, so after a bit of thought I came up with another design.

Second attempt, better but still didn't work

Final version

This time I decided to do things the other way around. In other words, make something flat with feet that stuck up, and use the main flat part as the base.

In hindsight this seems like the most obvious solution, but it took two failed attempts to get here.

Once I had the main parts worked out, I added the side joins so two supports could be joined together.

Final design