Peloton Laptop Tray

My mother commissioned this design after I moved back home in December 2021. She wanted some sort of tray or mount to allow her to view her laptop screen while running.

At first I thought I might just bend a coat hanger or two, glue some cardboard to it and call it a day. However, I quickly realized I wasn't satisfied with taking the easy route, so I set to brainstorming something a little more involved (and hopefully more reliable).

There didn't end up being a huge amount of evolution in the basic form of the item throughout the design process – I knew the final design would be some version of a tray mounted to the top of the Peloton's screen. Most of the evolution came down to determining how exactly the pieces should fit together.

Although my mother's requirements were extremely few, there were a few additional implicit design limitations I had to consider. Namely, I needed to be able to construct the thing myself despite my extremely limited access to tools and fabrication equipment at the time.

I settled on a design that used only 1/2" square poplar dowels for the side supports and mounting hooks and 1/2" circular poplar dowels for the tray. I could cut them easily and buy them cheaply enough to replace pieces if I messed anything up. I considered adding additional supports or L-brackets to ensure the weight of the laptop couldn't break the tray off, but considering the small size of my mother's laptop I decided they would be unnecessary for this implementation.

Before my parents converted their garage into a guest house we had a small work table, a number of hand woodworking tools, and even a few power tools. I was able to scrounge up the tools and turn a card table into a new workspace, but I still found myself surprised by how reliant I'd become on shop tools since beginning college. Everything I needed to do in order to assemble the mount could be accomplished with only hand tools, but I could have probably cut the assembly time by 75% while also reducing the number of imprecise cuts if I had access to a wood shop. I ultimately had to tweak the way the circular dowels slotted into the supports because without a drill press I couldn't effectively drill semicircles into the top halves of the square dowels for them to lie into.

Nonetheless, I'm still happy with how the final product turned out. My paranoia that my poor mother would accidentally get a splinter from the thing led me to sand every inch of every piece of wood very finely, so the whole thing is smooth to the touch and even has the appearance of softness. I think the unfinished wood look works well for this particular design, and I'm quite pleased with how using five dowels instead of a single flat piece of material for the tray surface looks.