The older Apple iPods used to come with stands. Nowadays, there aren't any stands included with your purchase. Even so, the free ones were cheap, plastic affairs. Making your own little stand isn't as hard as you might think. For starters, you don't absolutely need access to a laser-cutter. Laser-cutters are precision machine-operated tools that follow a guide map to cut materials. Since the stand is quite small, we think that you can use some old fashioned elbow grease to get it done.

Tod Kurt created this great little iPhone/iPod stand from four pieces of laser-cut acrylic scraps. It's really easy to make if you have access to a laser-cutter. The problem is that most of us don't. Basically, what this boils down to is creating the shapes so that you can assemble the stand using four screws. Let us just warn you that if you don't use a laser-cutter, chances are that your stand won't be as regular sided as the one in these photos. However we think that it doesn't matter. It's hard to make something transparent as this look bad. We think that uneven edges from using a sharp knife will actually look good.

You should use the .svg files as a guide to create your stand. We thing that wood could also work well. Using a chisel and some manual labor, we are sure that you can shape the pieces together. The only thing left is to drill holes in them and assemble them by using screws. The .svg file can be printed out, it's an image file made to scale. There are four pieces to carve out. The last piece is used as a stand to make sure that the cable doesn't prop the stand up. Kurt used pieces that were 1/4" of an inch thick. The first two have an opening to fit the iPod/iPhone connector. It's kept in place by friction, so make sure you don't cut it too loose. The 3rd and 4th slice have a channel to let the cable escape from the back. The bottom part helps to keep the stand stable. Kurt has a few suggestions on his build. He says that the base could be made wider so that the stand is more stable. That is an option for this build. Let us know how you can improve this design in the comments!

[via Make, images by Tod Kurt]