A case for a Fairphone 3 - Concept
Begin at the beginning.
A case for a Fairphone 3 - Table of Contents”
My wife and I have his and hers matching Fairphone 3 Android smartphones. I promised quite some time ago to make a book-style leather case for my wife’s phone using my Adler class 8 sewing machine. Due to the inadequacies of the motor control included with the aftermarket motor used to convert the treadle machine to electric power, I had to make a rather long detour through electronic design to come up with a control that meets my needs. Now that Bigfoot is running properly and my Adler is sufficiently tamed, it is time to make good on my promise.
This is a a Fairphone 3:
| My Fairphone 3 |
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I am planning to make what I call a book-style case for it.
This is a book style case that I made six or seven years ago for the Motorola phone I had at the time:
| Book-style case |
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At that time, I didn’t have a good way to sew leather (besides manually with a punch and needle,) so it is only glued together. It worked fine and I used it for a couple of years - you can see the grunge and grime that came from daily use. It was, however, rather thick and it wasn’t really all that well made.
It was thick because I used what leather I had to hand - some scraps of red leather and some pieces of an old cow hide that I had left over from the 1990s. The red leather was thicker than really needed for the covers. The frame was made of several layers cut from the cowhide - they had to be relatively wide because thinner strips wouldn’t have provided any protection for the phone.
The layered frame was what finally failed and caused me to replace the phone. I dropped the case one day, and it fell on a corner. The phone punched through two layers, shattering the display from the corner. Replacing the display failed, so I had to replace the phone with the larger Motorola phone I made this holster for. That phone died from unknown causes, so I replaced it with a Fairphone 3 like my wife already had.
Rather than try to make the frame for the phone out of leather, the new cases will make use of a commercially produced vinyl (or whatever kind of plastic it is) phone “bumper” that I’ll sew to the leather covers.
| Vinyl bumper for the Fairphone 3 |
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The bumper is thinner and lighter than the leather frame, and I’ve gotten hold of some much thinner leather to make the covers.
The idea is to make a large cover (front and back in one piece) with smaller covers sewn to the inside (front and back) so that there’s a finished surface inside and out. The bumper will be sewn to the inside back cover. There’ll be cutouts in the leather covers for the camera and the fingerprint sensor. The front cover will have a couple of lined credit card slots.
I’ve got in mind to decorate each case with either decorative stitching or with a shaped leather piece between the covers (sort of the inverse of inlaying.) I’ll decide on the final decorations as I go along - there’s too many options to pick one yet.
This is what I’ve currently got in hand for materials:
| Materials |
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Contact cement, thread, and credit card slot lining aren’t shown there. I’ll put a list of materials in a summary when everything is done.
The next post will be about drawing the plans for the leather pieces.