My wife needed to mount her tablet on a music stand so she could use the tablet to display sheet music on the tablet. There are all kinds of iPad holders, but not that many for the Toshiba Thrive, and none at all for her ancient Fujitsu tablet.

Initially we were thinking of various kinds of clamp mechanisms to hold the tablet to the sheet metal part of the music stand that would normally hold the sheet music, but eventually I realized that it would be easier to hack something out of the universal building material, PVC pipe.

I'm not supplying drawings or dimensions, as there are none: I just hacked the PVC until it fit around the tablets. On the Fujitsu holder (the first one I made) I used a table saw to free-hand cut the various slots that accomodate the tablet.

For the Toshiba holder, I used my "milling machine" (cross slide vice mounted to a drill press) to machine the slots, with a dremel and a sander to finish the cuts. Even if the result isn't much prettier, it was way less dangerous than hand feeding little bits of PVC through a 10" table saw.

We fully intend to paint these (probably black) but I photographed them in their unpainted state so the construction would be easier to see.

Total cost: a few dollars for PVC and glue and such, and 10 hours or so of cutting and gluing and sanding. Oh, and turning the piece that fits over the music stand shaft on my lathe, so it's inside diameter is a slip fit on the music stand.

Bill Dudley
December 2012