The next step was the ash tray. Using the mx5 as my daily, there was something that really bugged me; the car has no bloody cup holders! So after lots of looking around, I found the perfect thing. The jass performance cup holder!
It's a beautiful piece of aluminium with toggle switches attached for the windows. Perfect! except.. I couldn't find anywhere to buy it in this country! On top of that it was looking to be around £80. For £5 worth of aluminium sheet and two toggle switches. So i decided to make my own.
I started by drawing up a template, ran it off on a spare piece of dibond i had lying around, and tested the fit. A few modifications to the drawing later and I had a working template. Great! Time to run it out of aluminium! I couldnt find anything polished when i i was buying the piece i needed (250mm x 500mm. about £3 on ebay!) so I bought what i could, an anodized piece.
Then came the regret at buying it anodized. this meant that I had to sand down the anodized coating until i got back to raw aluminium. Once there i buffed it with a metal polishing kit i bought from eBay, came with a few different cutting compounds, polishing paste etc and a few wheels to go in a drill!
Polished up pretty nicely, so once happy I bent it at the point needed by clamping it in a vice between two pieces of timber, then simply putting pressure on it. This was exactly why I chose ally not steel!
Fitting nicely I secured it in place using some dome head m6 machne screws.
