The 3 Dollar Headphone Stand

A fairly quick, and easy headphone stand design that can be scaled to any size. It actually costs less than 3 dollars - the baton costs about 2 singapore dollars and the MDF base costs about 2 dollars for 6.

These are the basic tools and materials i used, though i seem to have forgotten to have the fairly standard file i used included in here. Shown

Materials
1x baton of wood - i used a 25x25x450mm baton with a trench cut in it - it looks nice, and its slightly easier to work with as you will see later.
screws - at least 1.5 as long as the wood depthwise - since we'll be screwing together the wood. I used 3.5mm x 40 mm screws
pin vise or similar with a 3.0mm  (or slightly smaller than the screws) bit for pilot holes.

1x 10mm x 10mm x 6mm MDF or other wood for the base.

Tools:

Essential - A saw, preferably a good one but you can make do with a slightly crappy one
                    some way to accurately remove a fairly large amount of wood - I use a gourge
                    A file or rasp to smoothen things while working on them

optional but heavily recommended - countersink bit (i didn't use one, i used the gauge, and the chisle bladed hobby knife to do a messy poor man's countersink


Optional
Mitre Box - I didn't use one for my original. they do make a lot more possibilities available

You'll need to cut two pieces out of your baton. The first piece is longer and serves as the vertical basis of the headphone stand, and the second is the crosspiece for the stand. For former cutting the baton as square as possible is good, unless you want the crosspiece as a handle. Aim to have the vertical beam tall enough that without the crosspiece, the headphone can rest on it without touching the base.

This is the most time consuming part of the project. Its probably easier to not do it how i did - a router would make short work of it, but i've documented it for anyone who wants to do it the hard way.

We're going to make an indent for the crosspiece to rest on.

Saw down as far as you want the indent to be. You don't want it to be so deep as to weaken that area, and not shallow enough to be useless. 1/5th the depth of the wood would be a good starting point. Use the gourge (or a chistle, or some other tool) to remove as much of the wood as possible between the two saw lines. If you have a saw which is messy and has a wide kerf, its perfect for this as well. Once you have it roughed out file it smooth.

Place the vertical beam on the crosspiece and mark the area where they overlap. Then estimate and drill a pilot hole all the way through the crosspiece so that you can screw the two of them together overlapping completely. If you can, countersink them - i didn't and relied on the softness of the wood and the slottedness of the wood. Since the pilot hole is smaller, the two pieces will be held tightly.

In my early versions, i had the vertical beam mounted to the center of the base. This is a bad idea since the weight of the headphones will make it tip over - find the center, and make a pilot hole 1/4 the way from one end of a square base - you want the center of gravity WITH the headphones on to be as close to the center of the base as possible to avoid tipping.

You will HAVE to countersink the screw hole on the base - I used a gouge to do that, but a proper countersink bit will be just better - to get it to sit flush. Screw the base to the vertical bar...

You should end up with something like this (but of course, this is an earlier model. note where the base and the vertical beam are connected). You can now sand/paint/finish it to your liking.