Designing With Tinkercad: Cord-Wrangler Phone Holder

In this Instructable, I'll go over the process of solving a problem through design, and come up with a pretty neat 3D-printable phone holder design.

All you really need for this tutorial is the following:
• Internet connection
• A free Tinkercad account
• Access to a 3D printer
• A problem you can solve

This is perhaps the most important step in designing something: you must have a purpose. Without an exact purpose for the design, you might be unsure what to do when designing it, or you might not really solve the problem you're looking to solve.

In this case, I have a phone holder that works just fine when my phone is in the landscape orientation, but the portrait orientation is nearly unusable! I can't charge it from this angle, and the center of mass is too high and too far back — it constantly wants to tip over!

In short, my problem is:
I need a new phone holder that can:
1. Keep the phone stable in portrait mode

2. Charge the phone while in this position

Any problem you're looking to solve should be simple and to the point. If you decide to make it multi-faceted, make sure they're all reasonably accomplishable goals — if you design a spoonrest, don't worry about making it open cabinet doors!

Now comes the early stages of design: come up with a few solutions to your problem, and see what you think will work best. This will become your new prototype. Don't be afraid to discard or rework ideas as you see fit! You may find yourself coming back to this step a few times, and that's fine. Trial and error is all part of design — that's why we do the next steps as well!

Now it's time to fire up Tinkercad and work to turn your design into a model for printing! While this tutorial focuses on using Tinkercad as a simple yet effective CAD software, it's not a Tinkercad tutorial. You can find Autodesk's official tutorials here!

As a sidenote, Tinkercad gives things funny autogenerated names, but they can be misleading and hard to understand when you have a library full of projects. It's a good practice to give your designs memorable names. Including the date you make it is a good idea, too — it can really help you sift through different prototyping versions if needed!

Now we get building. It's a good idea to start with the simplest shapes possible, which Tinkercad provides in great abundance. Make sure you're building at the size you need — if you want to fit an iPhone, be sure to scale your holder to the dimensions of your iPhone!

From the simple shapes, we can begin to cut away and expand shapes as needed. This is where designs really start to show up — you might realize a fault here and have to return to the drawing board, but that's alright. You'll be back here soon!

Note — Using Groups to combine both your base shapes and your holes is a good practice, since it can make managing both far, far easier!

Once you add on any finishing touches and refinements, you'll be ready to print out your new design and see how it works! You might find that you need to seriously rethink it all, or that you only need a few more little tweaks to be good to go. If you've gotten your problem solved effectively, great! If not, don't sweat it! You can just try again! Tinkercad is super easy to work with while still being quite capable as a CAD interface, so it's not too difficult to put your ideas into action — you should be willing to experiment and check things out!

I hope you've had fun designing with this guide! Be it for a new phone holder, a phone case, a bottle opener, a card stand, maybe even a fancy mug, remember to be proud — you designed it from the ground up! Thanks for reading!

As a bonus, I've included two files — the .STL of the phone holder made in this guide as well as a bonus that was made differently. See if you can tell which one's the final product!