Laptop Computer Mount

The toys I've had the most fun with in a long time are my GPS and laptop computer. I dreamed up a way of mounting my laptop in my truck. I started out with a crude idea and kept tweaking it until it actually works very well. There is no easy way to describe how I made it so you will just have to look at the photos.

It mounts on the middle console in my truck. It has cutouts so I can still rest my elbows on the console. There are a couple of pegs about two inches long on the bottom that rest against the sides of the console and help prevent the mount from sliding around. There is one bungee cord that hooks over the back of the console and under the seat. This keeps tension against the two pegs and prevents the mount from moving at all. However the whole thing can be removed in a few seconds and tossed in the toolbox. The laptop fits inside the console storage area.

The laptop is attached to the small table with velcro. The table is mounted to a lazy susan bearing. The lazy susan bearing is mounted to a horizontal drawer slide. The table can rotate left or right and is held in place with a spring loaded pin that slides into holes in the bottom board. This pin is a pivot pin for bifold doors that I bought at Lowes.

My laptop has a CD burner, DVD reader combination drive. My boys like to watch DVDs on the laptop. Having the table on the drawer slide permits them to slide the computer to the rear of the console so they can watch DVDs on the computer.

I have the cable to connect my GPS unit to my laptop and I run Mapsource mapping software in the laptop which shows me where I am all the time with input from the GPS. I did this to simply have another toy to play with. But it surprised me by actually being useful. In small towns and even dirt roads in the fields of Kansas the map display on the computer was a great help in knowing when a turn was coming up, whether I was on a dead end road or whether I should take the business route or go down main street. It was easy to glance at the computer and make decisions. I didn't have to pull over and look at a paper map. The map software had much more detail than the paper map.

Also with a paper map you first have to figure out where you are on the map to determine where you want to go. The computer always knows where you are and shows your place on the display so there is very little effort involved in going where you want to go.

As I said it was actually helpful in addition to being a fun toy. I bought a $29 power inverter from Wal-Mart that converts 12 volts DC into 120 volts AC. I plug my laptop transformer into the inverter for power.