As I stated in my last blog post, my family has been talking about going canoeing again. For safety reasons I plan on keeping my iPhone with me in the boat. Although I have a Lifeproof case on my phone that keeps it waterproof, if our canoe ward to flip over, my iPhone would sink to the bottom of the river! The last thing I want to do is be searching for my sunken phone, so I built a life vest for my iPhone.
The life vest is made from a single piece of 2-inch foam insulation. To build it the first thing I did was trace the outline of my phone onto the foam. After that, I drew a line on every side of the phone outline 1/2″ from the outline. This perimeter will be the size of the life vest. At this point I cut out the shape of the life vest using a box cutter. The rough dimensions of this foam rectangle are ~6″ x ~3.5″. I then began to hollow out the foam so my phone can slide in.
On one of the smaller edges of the foam I drew a rectangle the width and thickness of my phone about 1/2″ away from what will be the front face of my life vest. Then after sharpening the largest brass tube I had, I began to hollow out the foam. I did this by starting on the edge that I had the rectangle which was the width by the thickness of my phone drew. I then started plunging the brass tube perpendicular to the edge I was working on inside of this rectangle. As I pulled out the brass tube, the brass tube brought along with it a long plug of foam. I had a mark on the brass tube so I would know how deep into the foam I should shove it. After working on hollowing out the foam for a good 15 minutes, I was finally finished. At this point I could slide my iPhone into the chunk of foam and take it out, the only problem was I couldn’t see the screen!
After doing some measurements of my iPhone, I found out where the screen of the phone would be at when the phone was inside the foam. I then cut this section of foam out, plus a little more so I would be able to press the ‘home’ button when the phone is in the foam. At this point I was able to slide my phone into the chunk of foam and press the ‘home’ button. When I got to this point the foam was able to function as a usable life vest, but it looked horrible! So I made it look a bit nicer.
To make it look good, I took a box knife and angle the four edges of the back face of the foam. After that I used sandpaper to make all of the edges nice and round. To me, this looks a whole lot better than a perfect rectangle with square edges.
