I'm a big fan of my 5-inch random orbital sander, but I'm not a fan of waiting for it to come to rest before putting it down. So I created a little "rest box" for it; now when I'm working on a project, I can put the sander down immediately and move on to other tasks instead of waiting until the sanding disk stops randomly orbiting.

For the base, I used a slightly oversized piece of scrap pressure-treated 5/4 x 6 stock (to give the box a little extra weight), cut to 5 3/4 inches long. The key to the rest box is the low-friction plastic laminate that I used to surface the piece of PT. I glued the laminate to the PT with contact cement, then added 1/4-inch plywood to the sides, ripped wide enough to create a depth of about 3/4 inch within the box.

The interior dimensions of the rest box are sized slightly wider than the diameter of the random orbit sanding disk.
The sander rests on a thin sheet of foam cut to loosely fit within the rest box.

Then I placed a loose-fitting 5 1/4-by-5 1/4-inch piece of 1/8-inch-thick polyethylene foam in the box (any other durable material would do, as long as it grabs the sanding disk and slides on the laminate). The foam allows the sander to happily bounce around in its "corral" as it comes to rest.

Photos by the author.