Once again I employed the "2023" design of phone stands but with a few minor cosmetic tweaks for MY25. I took a page out of Apple's playbook and rounded some more corners. And be warned that just like Apple I'll have a team of lawyers standing by to sue the pants off anyone that dares to copy my innovative and distinctive "trade dress".

I decided to make 16 holders but as the first ones progressed I got to thinking that I should try some with a different design. I didn't want to compromise the desirable aspects of the current holder - sturdiness, adjustable angle, easy setting, fold-flatness and, well, woodiness - and frankly failed to come up with any good alternatives. I checked Apple's playbook again but the next thing was "glue everything together" which didn't seem like the best approach.

On the other hand I could maybe at least improve the manufacturability? So that was what I did; the pinned hinges and associated lumps/clearances/holes represent a substantial portion of the labour that goes into each stand so I ended up replacing them with sewn hinges. This gave virtually the same performance but required less routing/carving/shaping/sanding and let me give them a bit of a cleaner look. Since this is the 5th year that I've made phone stands, I'm calling the thread-hinged ones the 5th Anniversary Edition. Interestingly this is appropriate since the traditional gift for a 5th wedding anniversary is wood. Not that I'm married to these things...

And as usual I took photos of the build process, which I'll have to admit look virtually indistinguishable from the photos I took the last four times. But I'm not going to apologize.

I started out with the intent to make a batch of the conventional nail-hinged holders. I decided to make 16 of those so I selected some woods and dove in;

First off was gathering up some suitable woods that I had around the shop. That didn't provide quite as much variety as I had hoped so I also bought a few new planks to round out the selection.

However one of the woods was this piece of Maple burl that I've had for over 30 years, using little bits and pieces now and again.

If I recall correctly I bought it as a (relative) youngster at the Wood 'n Works store back when it was still around.

On the other hand this oddly-shaped piece of Figured Maple is only about 6 years old, left over from making a square cross-sectioned vessel.

This plank is one of the new woods - Padauk - that I've used before but didn't have any pieces left around.

It's a striking orange-red colour when freshly cut although it tends to darken over time.

The pieces were initially cut a bit oversized and later they were run through the bandsaw to get them to a more-exact width as seen here.

The rough band-sawn edges were then smoothed using the belt sander.

This particular piece is Aromatic Cedar which fills the shop with a very pleasant cedar scent to remind me that my dust collection system is imperfect.

The planer was used to mill the pieces to the desired thicknesses. I used my normal snipe-eliminating MDF sled and here I'm adding tape to the backsides of the pieces to adhere them to the sled.

Each sled-full of pieces went through the planer multiple times since it was usually set to remove only about 0.02" per pass. This thin cut prevented excess force on the pieces which could otherwise break the hold of the tape and shoot the piece back out of the planer.

The slight amusement factor that this ballistic effect supplies is tempered by the fact that it is often destructive to the ejected piece.

Through bitter experience wisdom gained over time, I knew to double-check the squareness of the pieces before cutting to final length. One of my small engineer's squares was just right for this job.

Nonconforming angles got a bit of time on a carefully-set-up belt sander to square up the edge.

In the background is a radiant heater (Thanks Greg & Cindy!) that I use to take off the chill. The shop has only one heat register so it is often around 19° in the winter which I find a bit nippy.

The last operation on the blanks was cutting to length - a task which I mostly performed using the radial arm saw.

For a few pieces where I was a bit tight on length, the band saw was used due to its much narrower kerf.

This is the first significant milestone: completed blanks for the three components of the phone stand.

I kicked off the shaping with the backrests - the pieces that require the most work.

They will be milled out to leave protruding hinge points and here I'm using the band saw to remove much of the extra wood prior to a routing operation.

The quality of dust collection varies over the different machines in the shop but it is worst for the band saw as the mess in this photo shows. This is likely due to the blade gussets grabbing sawdust and not letting go for a whole revolution or more.

All the backrests had a "strongback" - a length of squared-up 2x4 - taped to one face to provide stiffness and to make handling easier.

This photo shows what will be the back side of the backrest getting routed. This is the first pass of usually four increasing-depth passes used to form the hinge points.

The newly-routed surface is still fairly crude; it has tooling marks and untrimmed sections close to the hinge points.

This is a Padauk back showcasing its bright fresh-cut color.

Each backrest was clamped in the bench vise to be cleaned up manually. That included:
- Trimming off any extra wood around the hinge points,
- Rounding the hinge point ends (knife trimming followed by sanding), and
- Sanding the surface flat and the hinge points smooth.

Like the backrests, the bases went through a routing session. In their case it was to form the phone-holding notch. The routing left small ridges on the bottom which needed to be cut lower and then sanded smooth.

Drilling the 3/16" holes in the bases to match the pins of the prop has historically been a very labour-intensive process. Each base was mounted to a piece of scrap and held in a vise. The vise was sequentially set to five different angles to drill the 5 sets of holes, all marked on the wood and aligned by eye.

This was so painful to do that I checked to see if a single drill angle could be used. And sure enough - using the angle of the middle holes for all of them worked almost as well as custom angles; I ended up drilling them all at 14° from the vertical. I also made a drilling jig and a set of spacers so no measuring or marking was required. That made adding the pin holes substantially simpler and much more consistent to boot.

The last component of the stand is the prop which is also the simplest to make.

This photo shows prop pieces on which the pins have been roughed out.

Immediately behind them are some bases that have just been started and further in the background you can just glimpse the blurry corners of a pile of backrests that are almost completed.

The props just needed a bit of shaping. Here a square pin is being rounded using a small file and following that, some rounded edges and corners will complete the work.

A significant technical challenge has always been drilling the hinge holes so that the pieces would line up accurately and be properly spaced and square to each other. My previous builds had several holders that would have gone together crookedly if I hadn't filled the first holes and re-drilled with better accuracy.

For this batch I took some time to come up with a specific procedure that resulted in more-repeatable drilling. The first step was to drill the hinge holes in the props as seen here; the jig on the drill press precisely positioned the edge of the prop so the hole would be accurately centered in the rather thin wood.

All the hinge holes were drilled with a 1mm bit. The holes in the backrest were drilled with the aid of some small wooden patterns carefully positioned and clamped in place.

The brown block was just held against the backrest to ensure it was vertical.

Somewhere along the line while I was performing dozens of processes on dozens of pieces for the holders, it occurred to me that I should see if there were alternate designs I could implement that might be more interesting or simpler to make. I think I managed to at least achieve "simpler to make" with the sewn-hinge approach and maybe to some they will be more interesting than pinned hinges as well.

I started looking at the new design 3 or 4 weeks into the stand making (which turned out to be a 9-week project) and the first thing I did was buy a few more pieces of interesting wood.

I ended up with these three planks; from left to right: Santos Rosewood, Wenge and Zebrawood. I also included some cherry from the shop to give four different woods.

I didn't want to make too too many extra stands so I cut up enough wood for 2 stands of each of the four woods. It turned out that I could use thinner pieces for the new design so I ended up with enough wood for a few extra stands, resulting in the number creeping up to 10.

Here the rough-cut pieces are lined up on the radial arm saw table.

Before getting too far into it I needed to check a few aspects of the sewn hinge like thread type and routing, plus how many holes were needed.

I used these pieces of Black Limba and tried a few things out. The right hinge has conventional polyester thread while the thinner stuff on the left hinge is an elastic 0.3 mm thread. I found a suitable routing and it looked like the hinge would work with either type of thread.

In the test piece above, I had carefully marked the thread hole locations and then carefully center-punched them before carefully drilling. However despite that heroic effort, the hole spacing was still noticeably irregular.

I decided I needed a drill pattern if I hoped to get accurately-positioned holes. This just ended up being an aluminium plate into which a buddy with an NC drill was able to accurately drill a suitable pattern of holes.

This "worked a treat" as they probably don't actually say in the UK. I just taped down the plate and it precisely located the holes.

So then I figured I should put one stand together to make sure all the hole positionings and spacings were going to work out. I drilled the pieces of a cherry stand with my handy pattern, threaded up a needle and got sewing.

In this photo I'm about half done sewing the prop to the backrest.

Everything seemed to line up as expected so I considered the "First Article Inspection" to have been passed with no red flags.

And of course I needed to do some final inspection and sanding on all the pieces, followed by adding my initials and the year to the bottom.

And then it was on to the finishing. I usually did groups of 5 or 6 stands at a time, each equipped with a wire loop to hang them as they dried.

Since I was using polyurethane varnish, each dried coat needed to be roughed up before adding the next. This was done primarily with #0000 steel wool.

Steel wool isn't very strong so for the insides of the pin holes I used a synthetic steel wool substitute that I could cut into strips.

Once varnished they were hung up to dry near the shop exhaust fan.

On a few of the stands the varnish wasn't drying as usual. They should have hardened inside of a day but for these they were soft even after a week of drying in a warm environment. I didn't want to toss them so instead I removed the varnish.

The first step was to scrape off as much varnish as possible using a small scraper. Then steel wool and sandpaper were used to get the remainders.

Some reading suggested that shellac was a good finish choice for these problem woods. I bought a can of pre-mixed shellac and it seemed to dry on a test piece so I proceeded to coat the stands.

Shellac is a bit odd in that it dissolves the existing layers which means the surface gets sticky right after being brushed and can't be touched/brushed again or it will cause lumps. On the other hand it dries quickly which is good since the pieces need lots of coats (I used 6).

When fully dry the shellac possessed a nasty shiny finish and was quite rough - an artefact of having to coat all the surfaces. It's obvious in this shot that the shellac-coated rosewood on the bottom is significantly more reflective than the polyurethane-varnished tigerwood sample above.

The shellac bumps and shine were tamed with 320 grit sandpaper and steel wool. After that I applied a coat of wax for a bit more protection. At least the final finish looked decent despite it being a pain to get there.

The assembly of the pinned stands was a snap. My new hinge-hole drilling technique resulted in much more-accurately located holes and none of the parts had any issues with fitting or alignment - a situation that could not be said the last four times I made these. The sewn stands took a bit more assembly work of course but overall they were still much less work than the pinned stands.

The assembly of the nail-hinged stands was pretty quick. They needed only the four nails inserted before the feet and label were added.

If the nails were particularly loose and prone to falling out, I added a bit of glue to keep them in place.

The sewn-hinge stands were a bit more work since both hinges needed to be sewn and the thread ends glued.

The hinges took 10 or 15 minutes each to stitch (when I didn't make a mistake in the sewing) and then the ends were glued to keep them from unravelling.

Each base had four little feet added to keep the stand from sliding about. The smallest "dome" feet I was able to find were still too high at 0.08" so I punched out discs from the material between the domes. That produced feet only 0.02" high which was much more suitable.

This shot shows a base with the feet and label in place.