A Multipurpose Cardboard Support for Smartphone

Hello my
instructables friends.

Greetings from Colombia, today I want to teach you my first instructable, I have been a big fan of this community since the first moment I started to explore the wonderful projects that you my friends share with all of us, until now I had been a passive member of this great community but, I finally got inspiration and decided to make my first instructable.

But, what is it about? I wanted to make a tool that was really functional for all of us, that was very low price and that anyone could do from home, after much thinking and then some failed prototypes I bring you an elegant, great and multipurpose cardboard support for smart phone.

I really hope you like and are encouraged to do this project. (Please forgive me for my English, help me our great friend google translator)

• A cardboard box (I use a box of corn flakes)
• Glue Stic
• Embossing tool
• Steel Ruler
• Metal Handle Scalpel Blade
• Model print on a paper sheet.

I will give you a
template of my smartphone support design, where you can put the image you want and modify it in the way you want.

To modify it you will have to take into account the following steps (this process is valid for Corel DRAW)

Open the file "Patron.cdr"

Select the image you wish to have in your multipurpose cardboard support for smartphone, and enter it in CorelDRAW (for this you have to press “Ctrl + I”, in CoredDRAW).

Then we will right click on the image and select: Edit Bit map (this to remove the background of the image)

After this, Corel PHOTO-PAINT will have to open automatically with the image you want to edit

To eliminate the background of the image, it is necessary to go to: image> laboratory to trim / Extract

This opens a new window called the Crop / Extract lab, in this window we will eliminate the background of the image. For that we are going to use the tool to highlight (pressing the “F5” key) and we will carefully select the contour of the image. This should look something like this:

Then with the “F” key we will select the interior filling tool, and we will click on the part of the image that we want to keep. That should look something like this:

Then we will press the “Ctrl + P” keys, to access the preview of our image without background

Is possible that when doing this action we eliminate parts of the image, to correct this we can use the "add detail" tool pressing the “A” key. Or the opposite can happen, that we preserve parts of the image that we do not want, for this we can use the "remove detail" tool pressing the “R” key. To use any of these two tools we must drag them over the part of the image that we want to correct.

When everything is just right as we want, we click on accept. (This closes the Crop / Extract lab window and returns us to Corel PHOTO-PAINT with our already edited image)

Then we have to save the changes made to the image with the “Ctrl + S" keys. When we save the image in Corel PHOTO-PAINT it changes automatically in Corel DRAW to how we have edited the image.

Then we must drag the image to the right position for our multipurpose cardboard support for smartphone, for this we can help us with the guidelines (Blue lines)

Now, we will apply a great background for our multipurpose cardboard support for smartphone, for this I will explain you two ways.

For the first way, we will fill in the template, then we must open the "fill editor" pressing the “F11” key and select the one that we like the most. That easy!

For the second way, we can insert a background image, to insert this image it is necessary
to follow the procedure described in step number 3. When the image is inserted it is necessary to scale it to the size of the template (this in case the image is smaller than our template, if the image is bigger, I recommend leaving it the original size).

Then we right click on the image and select the option “PowerClip ...” this will require us to select the place where we want to put the image, we just have to select a line from our template. It works like magic!

Finally, we just have to save our design from our own multipurpose cardboard support for smartphone. (I recommend doing it as PDF)

First we must disassemble the cereal box and leave only the front and back sides (with a box we can make two multipurpose cardboard support for smartphone), also, we must cut the top and bottom of our template printed on paper (this to ensure a good position on the cardboard when sticking the template printed on a cardboard box)

We check that our template is not bigger than the cardboard box that we are going to use for this instructable, then apply the stick adhesive on the entire surface of the cardboard (you can use the face you want) ensuring that it is evenly spread and there are no clumps on the surface

Trim the outline of our pattern and the main image (taking into account the lines of doubles)

Embossing the lines of doubles with the help of embossing tool and a ruler, also, we open a little the holes where the fins to secure are inserted (as shown in the image).

We will start to assemble our multipurpose cardboard support for smartphone, starting with the lateral supports.