How I made LED cup holder rings...

I have the images hosted on the Moomba forum and linked them over here - not sure if that works or not? If you can't see them let me know and I'll re-upload them here.



We had a rainy weekend, so I decided to put some scrap acrylic and spare LEDs to good use and try to make my own LED cup holder rings. I must say, they turned out pretty sweet, and I like the lower profile as opposed to the commercially available units, which are a bit thicker.

Here is a bit of a 'How Tow' for those that are interested;

Keeping in the 'low budget' feel of this project, rather than buying a router table, I made one of my own, lol. My router has a 'plunge' option that made this work awesome, basically I was able to have the bit under the base of the table, put the acrylic in place, then push the table down onto the spinning bit, cutting into the acrylic. The key in the cutting is constant motion to keep from melting the plastic;

I measured out radius for the inside and outside of the circles and drilled a hole in the "table" for each, and marked them with an orange highlighter so I remembered which were correct (it was a trail and error process).

So, to start I drilled a hole in what will become the center of the circle. From there, I used an allen wrench through the hole and into the hole on the table that I drilled for the outside, cutting a perfect circle;



Then I switched the allen wrench to the smaller hole and cut the inside circle;

Note - the inside circle was a little tight so I had to open it up freehand with the router, hence the rough inside edge - not a big deal since you can't see once mounted.

Once I had the rings figured out I needed to shorten the LED strips - easy enough, I just had to cut them to length and solder wires onto the ends;


*Not pictured: I used a coarse sanding block to give the acrylic a frosted look, and remove any rough edges from the router.

Ready to mount. the ring and LED strip;



This is where the cup holder rings are a little different than the speaker rings; because the thickness of the ring is less than the LED, I stuck the LED strip directly to the cup holder, rather than gluing it to the ring. Once I had the LED in place I slipped the ring over top, and gave it a test fit;


Once I had each cup holder setup complete I just had to go into the boat and put them in place. I secured them with 3M double sided tape;


And a shot in the dark;


Mounting in the fiberglass was a little tricky - I had to cut a bit of a slot for the wires to feed through, as the factory hole is very tight and wouldn't allow the cup holder to sit flush due to the thickness of the wire - I guess if I used smaller wire this might not have been an issue, but it was an easy enough fix, and you can't see where I had to cut because its under the lip.



Supplies:
18"x24"x.22" Acrylic Sheet: $18 (Home Depot - 18x24 is way more than you'll need, I just used scrap from another project)

5m of Blue 3528 SMD LEDs $25 (eBay - I bought from seller 'torchstar' but there are literally hundreds. Each ring will take ~12" of LEDs, so you don't actually need 5m, I just had these left over)

3M Double Sided Tape $8 (Home Depot)
Scrap Wire to solder to the LED strips
Electrical Tape or Heat Shrink Tubing

Tools:
-Router & piece of scrap wood for "table"
-Straight bit $13 (Home Depot)
-Drill and small drill bit
-Coarse sand paper
-Soldering Iron

Overall this was a pretty quick project; including my 'trial & error' and installation into the boat I'd estimate I have less than 2 hours in this total.