Clear Apple Watch Holder

I have a thing for clear — glass, acrylic, crystal, anything light can pass through and bounce around inside. Using my fairly new Formlabs Form2 3D printer and the Formlabs clear resin, I wanted to see just how optically clear I could get the material.

Apple Watch docked and charging on the clear resin holder, screen reading 9:20 on a Sunday

Turns out: pretty darn clear — but not for free. Resin comes off the printer frosted and cloudy, basically matte. All the transparency is in the finishing. This one got wet-sanded up through progressively finer grits, then polished with plastic polish and sealed with clear coat, giving it an optically clear glass-like finish.

Profile view of the watch leaning back on the holder, light catching in the polished resin

And the shape was its own adventure. I designed it in Rhino, which I’ll take over SolidWorks any day for anything that wants to be curvy and organic (Rhino’s no Blender or Zbrush, let me be clear — but it speaks NURBS, and NURBS is where the smooth lives). The catch was that I was learning Rhino and learning NURBS surface modeling at the same time, on a part that’s basically nothing but compound curves. There were some rough drafts in there. A few I’d rather not show you. But it came out all right.

The magnetic charger drops into the back with the cable routing cleanly through a channel. The watch sits in a rounded ledge making it super easy to just drop the watch in place and start charing. In the morning, it’s stable enough for you to hit the buttons and snooze away. Also easy to cusotmize with a name or a logo.

The empty holder on its own,

This was the first one. Since then I’ve made a handful more in different styles and colors, personalized for a few different people — but the original clear one is still my favorite. Go figure.