HOW TO BUILD A TABLE THAT CHARGES YOUR PHONE!

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Jun 13

Written By Rachael

Today we are SUPER excited to be making a really cool DIY charging table! The plan is to take a wireless charging pad and install it into a table top for a seamless and lovely wireless charging experience! There are some phones that can natively wirelessly charge, but if your phone doesn’t have this function, you can easily buy a little add-on accessory to enable wireless charging!

wireless charging table

MATERIALS:

Wireless charging pad
Table base (ours is from IKEA)
½ inch plywood
¼ inch plywood
Stain
Gloss sealant
Two support plates
Short screws
Wood glue

TOOLS:

Drill
Jigsaw
Paint brush

We started by picking up this really inexpensive table base from IKEA. Our table came with a circular metal top that we are going to simply remove and use as a template to trace our wood. The ¼ plywood that you choose is going to be the top of the table, so make sure this wood is a little nicer looking than the ½ inch piece. Go ahead and trace out the size of your table on both pieces.

Before cutting, we also marked out a space for the wireless charger to go on the ½ inch plywood. We placed our charger off to the side to leave space for other stuff to go on your table. A great tip for cutting out the piece that is on the inside edge of the table is to first drill holes into each of the corners of the square, and then go in with a jigsaw to cut out the rest of the shape. Be sure to drill the corner holes to be big enough for the jigsaw blade to fit through.

Once this is cut, we gave everything a quick sand. Next, make sure your two sizes if plywood are the same size, and before cutting the circle shape, go ahead and apply a liberal layer of wood glue and attach the two pieces together. For additional support, we also added some short screws that go through the bottom piece, but not the top ¼ inch piece. While we wait for that to dry, we are going to go ahead and cut out a piece of our ¼ inch plywood to fit on top of our charging pad to hold it in place.

Once everything was dry, we cut out the circular shape using a jigsaw and sanded it down using an electric sander. Time to add the charging pad! You want to make sure that the charging pad is pressed up against the top of the table firmly. To make sure this happens, we added a small piece of foam against the pad to hold it firmly in place! To hold everything in place, we are adding some support plates to the corners of the small piece of wood.

Next, go ahead and flip the table right-side-up and find where the wireless charging works best by placing your phone on top of the table. Once you find the perfect placement, go ahead and mark the corners of the phone with a pencil! Once marked, remove the phone and use a chisel to add marks when the pencil is. Once the table is stained, the marks will be easily noticeable but still subtle.