Everything you see - Made by Me
A headphone stand is not a complicated item and it doesn’t need to be! This headphone stand has an additional hole to avoid dangling cables.
The design for this holder is rather unremarkable, save for the method with which it attaches to the desk. While a screw clamp or similar design would be far more secure, it would also be much more complicated. In this design, I decided to try a simple compliant mechanism to clamp the stand to the desk under constant tension. More importantly, this design choice provided an interesting opportunity to study a fundamental engineering mode of failure.
From an engineering perspective, the primary mode of failure for this type of clamp is creep elongation, which gradually causes the compressive strength of the mechanism to decrease over time. Originally I printed prototypes using PLA, which is notorious for its poor resistance to creep. Amplified by the extremely simple nature of the clamp, the clamp eventually permanently deformed into a relaxed state, making the holder less functional. Reprinting the same design in a more mechanically resilient material like PETG resulted in significantly longer life of the clamp, however creep is inevitable with all materials under enough stress. In the future, I believe further iteration on the compliant mechanism, or the addition of a TPU sleeve to even out the applied pressure may improve the overall clamping strength of the holder.
