"Levitating" Phone Caddy 5G

5 G refers to this being the 5th version of a phone caddy.  I still have the old 4 G phone. I've been doing a lot of stuff that was of little note to be worthy of a post, except for this one which is kind of worth sharing because for a little project, this took up a lot of time.  Of course, small projects do tend to take more time than larger ones to begin with but this was a bit more.  Mistakes get readily amplified on small items and especially more so when one is deciding how to do it as the project goes along.  Trial and error best describes this.  I think it turned out okay.

My wife and I don't normally have our phones with us all the time, not always in our pockets, for sure, so we both use a phone caddy to hold them at a specific place in the house that we can easily remember. Keyword is, "remember". For us of a certain age, it can't just be where we put it last after use. Looking for it could be a time-sapping chore. It serves as a charging stand as well.

It is a "levitating" illusion obviously.

Small projects, of course, require small pieces.  Small pieces can come from the scrap heap where I keep cutoffs of hard wood pieces.  Naturally, in this blog, I've ignored to show the bloopers. Only how it was successfully done. 

Scrap pieces

 

Wood glue will turn narrow pieces into a wider piece

The technique I used in making the knife stands (as seen in 2 or more prior blogs) came in handy.

Cutting and re-gluing did the trick to finish the base

Fashioning the side brackets to hold phone (below).

Leftover Lexan, a brand of polycarbonate, purchased online for another project served a crucial purpose for "levitating" the bracket (above) that will hold the phone.  Shown below with protective layer and one with the peeled-off plastic layer.

Now, it is becoming "clearer", pun intended, why the clear acrylic serves a critical role.  By the way, polycarbonate is not only clear as glass, it is much stronger.  It will not easily break or shatter. Clearly (pardon the pun again) more economical than glass and easy to work with since it can easily be cut on the table saw.

Cutting the groove on a piece of mahogany was to create the slot (shown in 3 photos below  into which the Lexan bridge linking the base to the bracket can slip into.

Phone caddy shown (left) with two of four projects in earlier versions.  The center photo is one that I use in the car dashboard when using phone for navigation. The one on the right is for my wife's phone.

The back views show that the new phone caddy (left) is, unlike the previous ones, without any hardware of any kind. That's what made constructing and assembling a little more challenging.

This will easily dis-assemble in three component parts and put together again in no time, requiring quite a bit of precision in construction. It will not work otherwise.

What happens if and when I get a newer phone later (like the real 5 G version) which will likely not fit the above phone caddy?  It will be another project!