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Hey guys. This is my Yeti Cooler.
I probably don't need to explain to you why these are cool.
Yeti has pretty recently come out with a cup holder that hangs on the side here and gives
you a cup holder right here. It's a really nice product made out of stainless
steel and powder coated. The only thing is that they are $25 to 30
dollars. I'd like to have one but I just don't feel
paying that much money so I was trying to come up with something a little bit cheaper.
Yeti's cup holder design is really quality and I don't want to take anything away from
it. If you're going to use this really often I
would probably just go ahead and buy the one from Yeti.
This is something that I'm not going to use real often.
Maybe 5 or 10 times a year and it's pretty cheap.
If you look at Yeti's design it looks like an old style cup holder that you would hang
on the door of a car. So that started me thinking.
I went to Walmart and I found these. It's 4 of them, four plastic ones for $1.98.
And then I just modify them to hang on the side of the cooler.
As they come new, this part right here is too wide to really do much good.
It just kind of, It's just floppy. We need it to sit tight.
I'm going to show you how to modify it. I found these cup holders at walmart.
They come with this tag on it. Kind of nested like this in the store.
It's the Auto Drive series. 44 fluid ounce capacity drink holders.
They're marketed by Walmart so you might only be able to find them at Walmart.
I'm not sure. They come nested like this.
You get 4 for $1.98. This is what they look like from the store.
They've got these stabilizing fingers in here to keep your drinks from moving around...smaller
drinks. I didn't really care for the fingers so what
you do is just kind of snap them off. They break pretty easily.
That way you can put a can in there with a koozie or a larger drink if you want.
You just snap them off like this and you're left with an open cup holder.
After that we need to make this hook closer to the body.
So what I did is just, again, snap this off. They break fairly easily and then we're going
to heat this basically in the middle here. You want the distance from the body to the
new hook to be about 3/4 of an inch. Underneath here there's some writing.
Basically if you heat it right there, and then bend it when it's hot it will stay where
you want it. Just heat it.....and it doesn't take too long
to heat this up hot enough to bend. You'll start seeing it look a little bit watery,
a little bit like liquid. If it starts giving off some smoke, you've
gone to far. You just heat it and bend it and it's probably
better if you bend it a little bit further in than 90 degrees.
That will help clamp onto the side of the cooler.
So just hold it there, you can blow on it a little bit.
Basically just hold it till it cools down and it should stay there.
So you can see that it's already cool enough to touch.
Obviously be real careful with your lighter. Don't burn yourself!
Don't burn your house down or anything like that.
It heats up pretty fast and it cools down pretty fast.
You can see that it's pretty stiff already. It's still a little bit warm to the touch.
That's basically all that you do. Again, you want this distance in here to be
three quarters of an inch because that's what the dimension on the cooler is.
So that's it. That's all the mods.
So now you can hang one on each side of your cooler.
It works out pretty well. So here's the finished product.
You can see the much tighter bend and the lack of stabilizing fingers in there.
It just hangs on here and fits snug. When you close the lid, it can't come off.
It fits big items, even big Nalgene bottles. Cans will still be held upright and it still
fits coozies real well too. It's just a nice option.
You know, $0.50 each or something, if you break one or loose it, it's not a big deal.
I just thought you might want to see that. I appreciate you watching and let me know
if you've got any questions!