Laptops might have been designed with portability and long battery life in mind, but they weren't designed for comfort.
Use a laptop on your coffee table for more than five minutes and you're transformed into a warped and twisted, hunchbacked visage of a human being.
- A3 acrylic sheet
- Case fan
- USB cable
- Protective gloves
- Hot-air paint stripper
- Soldering kit
- Clamps
- Workbench
- Wire wool
1. At its heart this project is superbly easy, but due to the hot-air gun, we'd recommend a workbench.
2. Make sure you get a decent-sized acrylic sheet. We'll need about 7 to 10cm for the rear fold and 3 to 5cm for the front fold then 20 to 30cm for the main section (depending on the size of your laptop). As it turns out an A3 sheet is about right and widely available on eBay.
3. Measure and clamp the sheet in place and peel any protective plastic well out of the way. Pop on protective gloves and use the heat gun on a 'cool' 300°C setting. Evenly heat the sheet where you want the fold. This will take a good few minutes.
4. Once you've made the back fold, do the same for the front. We bent this completely back on itself to make a comfortable fold if we rest it on our legs.
5. That could be it right there, but we're going to add extra cooling. Flip the laptop over and mark out where the cooling vents are. Make sure you drill/cut slowly otherwise you'll crack the plastic.
6. Take an existing USB cable and strip a off suitable length.
7. Choose a low-power fan as it'll only be supplied with 5v of power from your laptop's USB port (rather than the 12v our fan says it needs). Solder the black and red connections together.
8. To make a neat finish, counter sink screw holes in the plastic, so the fan screws will be flush.
9. Our final touch is to add a strip of silicon rubber to stop the laptop from slipping. Alternatively, you could use rubber pads.
10. And we're done!