Like a lot of people, I work from home most of the time now. I recently moved my monitors onto my desk to get them a bit closer to my eyes, and I found I needed a bit more real-estate on my desk. With my personal laptop, work laptop, and now monitors, there was no place for anything else. I decided that I wanted to essentially use my laptop screen as a third monitor, and I started looking for a laptop stand that would hold it up at a steep angle. When I didn’t find anything commercially available, I went ahead and made one myself.
I started off by setting up my desk the way I wanted it, with the best monitor set at the right height for me. I sleeved my janky school project desktop vice in a cloth bag to avoid scratching, leaned my laptop and a piece of wood up inside the vice. Then I tightened the vice to raise the laptop until the screen was aligned just about with the middle of its neighbor monitor in the configuration that I prefer.
I found that, at my desired height, the laptop screen was almost perfectly vertical and open all the way, so it was also the absolute maximum angle the laptop stand could support. While it was sitting in the vice, I measured the height the front edge sat off the table and the incline angle. Then I measured the laptop’s foot layout to make the seat. I made sure to leave room around the indicator lights and SD card slot when designing the stand. I also decided to place material directly under the speakers that are on the back to help the sound reflect towards me evenly, as it would if the laptop was sitting on a table.
I used a miter saw to cut the legs out of some scrap 1×2 dimensional lumber at the correct angles. I used a circular saw to cut a good-looking strip for the retaining lip out of some scrap wood left over from my bathroom vanity project.
I decided to screw the whole thing together in case I need to modify it for another laptop in the future. There is some space at the bottom for wires to go under the stand in the front.
It works perfectly. The laptop screen is at the perfect height, and now I have room on my desk to pile all my useless junk. It turned out so well that I will probably make another one for my wife, who has the same model laptop.
