SPONTAN Laptop Rack

·October 27, 2016·2 Comments

This is a modified Spontan magazine rack. We attached them to the walls outside the bathrooms at work so that you have somewhere safe to leave your laptop (rather than on the basin inside!).

The Spontan is made of metal (with an enamel coating). While it is designed for magazines and newspapers, it is quite strong, and can hold a laptop fairly easily. One of the problems though is that the metal surfaces may scratch the body of our precious laptops. We needed a padding solution.

For the “inside” of the rack, the part that you can’t see, we cut pieces of high density foam to size. It has self adhesive on one side. We stuck it on the “inside” surfaces of the rack. This must extend down to where the bottom edge of the laptop will rest.

We also need padding on some of the front facing surfaces, as the laptop will rest against these as well. We ended up using a roll of “event carpet”, a book of fabric samples for chairs and a sheet of polyurethane.

To stick them onto the metal surface, we got some sandpaper and roughed up the front facing surfaces that needed padding and then stuck them on using hot glue. I wasn’t totally satisfied with the bond, but there won’t be a lot of lateral pressure, so it should stick pretty well. I think if any need re-sticking I will use Araldite.

In 24 hours we designed, built and installed 13 of these in our company as part of a hack-a-thon. They earned us the prize for the best non-technical hack.