I’m travelling, and was getting desperate for a case for my phone (a Moto X) – I just couldn’t find one anywhere, so thought I would try a technique I saw somewhere.

The idea is that you (temporarily) protect your phone with a layer of plastic, hit it with the hot glue, then extract the whole lot from the phone and remove the excess plastic – leaving a shell of hot glue that becomes a perfectly conforming case. I’d seen this technique somewhere on youtube, and the guy who did it used a plastic bag, sealed with tape, to cover his phone. This was the first attempt:

It really didn’t give me the result I wanted; the glue bonded to the plastic bag too well and wouldn’t separate, so it was just a horrible crinkly mess. I thought about what other materials I could use to form the case around and aluminium foil seemed to fit the bill (or the phone, in this case):

It’s ductile enough to conform to the shape of the phone, and the hot glue peels straight off it.

Before wrapping the phone in foil, I put it on aeroplane mode. Don’t want to blow up the RF frontends or something.

This was the pattern I ended up with:

It separates very easily from the aluminium form.

The case lasted a few weeks before it started to deteriorate. It could be repaired easily but I haven’t bothered yet. I’m now wondering if I can attempt the same thing with a silicone mixture, poured over to achieve the same effect.