The iPad Chair

iPad Chair

I am working on a fun, geeky project and I needed a little stand for an iPad.  I am not a real fan of the Apple company, but my wife got this though work and it will be perfect for my project.  I love this flat-pack style of construction and I was inspired by my recent post on SketchChair.  So I decided to make a little chair as my stand.

I started out by downloading the SketchChair software.  I was able to create a lot of cool chairs, but I could never get exactly what I wanted.  The software is a great concept, but it was not quite ready for what I needed.  I switched over to my 3D CAD package (Pro/E).  I stole a lot of the construction techniques in SketchChair, but modeled it in exact scale in Pro/E.  The design only uses four distinct pieces: 2 Sides, 2 Center Pieces, 6 Slats and 1 rear leg brace.

iPad Chair Mode

I exported the the drawing of the pieces via DXF (DXF Is here) to my Vectric Aspire CAM program.  Here I duplicated the parts to what I needed and used the nesting feature to fill the cardboard size I had.  Normally I would restrain the amount of rotation allowed to keep a consistent grain direction, but this time I let it rotate any any angle (screen says 45deg, but I actually used 5deg).  I wanted the finished product to look sort of cattywampus.

Chair in Aspire

The material I used was a single, used, medium USPS shipping box.  This is very light cardboard at 1/16″ thick.  I cut it using my open source laser cutter.  I ran it at full power at about 40 ipm and a little assist air to stop the fire.  I probably could have run faster, but It was my first time with this material.

Cardboard

I put it together using Elmers No Run Gel School Glue.  It gets a lot stronger once all the parts are on and the glue dries.  It turned out perfect for what I wanted. …. stayed tuned for the upcoming uber geeky use of this.

iPad Chair

iPad Chair

iPad Chair

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3 Responses to “The iPad Chair”


  1. Greg Saul

    Nice chair! I love the idea of family of devices sitting around on their own little chairs.
    Sorry about the problems with the SketchChair software, hopefully I’ll get some time to make the whole thing a little more user friendly shortly.

  2. bdring

    I actually had a lot of fun playing with SketchChair, but just could dial it in when I tried to scale down to iPad size.

    yes…me and the iPad sat down and watched NetFlix on the TV when we were done with the project.

  3. Full color 3-D viewing Stand For iPad at Buildlog.Net Blog

    […] Kumlehn of Pixel Partner sent me a nice email regarding the iPad Chair.  He did a roughly similar Instructable to mine on an iPad 3-D viewer.  This is another laser cut […]

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