Earlier this year, I replaced my computer monitors with slightly larger ones. The new monitors came with stands that don’t adjust vertically, so I bought some small shelves from Amazon to raise the monitors. The shelves had little cut outs to hold my phone and allow the charging cable to remain connected — super useful! After months of neck pain I realized the shelves make the monitors too tall. Instead of hacking them up with a jigsaw I flipped them upside-down, which lowers the top shelf by about two inches. Now they’re the perfect height… but I can no longer use the built-in phone holder.

So, I decided to print one.

Thingiverse has hundreds of free phone holder models available to download and print, but I quickly found and settled on this one. It’s super simple and super small. It has no moving parts, so there’s nothing to break. The two notches hold the phone at slightly different angles, and because it holds the phone horizontally it doesn’t block my phone’s charging port. Best of all, the print uses 6g of filament. I’ve been printing with a roll I paid $20 for which means this holder costs 12 cents to make.

Using “down and dirty” print quality, the stand takes about 45 minutes to print… which is good as I ended up printing four of them — one for Susan, one for Morgan, and two for me. One will live on my desk and the other ended up in my backpack. It’s super annoying to have to continually pick up my phone in meetings or at work to check notifications. This little stand will alleviate that.

This is not my current phone. This is a ten-year-old iPhone 4 that lives in my desk drawer. I keep it as a backup in case my current phone breaks. In reality I would never in a million years use this iPhone 4 for anything, except as a phone model in a picture. Thank goodness I held onto it for a decade for that!

BONUS

I was so happy with how the stand turned out that I went back to Thingiverse and found a stand for my tablet. The tablet stand is larger and used 15g (30 cents) of filament.

My buddy Jeff recently printed a Halloween prop that took multiple days to complete. I have never attempted anything remotely that complicated. What I do enjoy is printing these little items that before I would either go without, or spend $10 on at a discount store or online to order. I have lots of 3D-printed headphone hangers, mask holders, and other odds and ends all around my office.