Sunday, November 19, 2006

Cup holder upgrade

The first of the changes is to upgrade the center console to the 2005 Jetta console that contains cup holders.

When the LCD screen is installed and deployed for use, it will obstruct the in-dash cup holders. Since I spend a lot of time in my car, I really wanted to have cup holders ;-)

Below is the before picture which shows the stock 2000 Jetta center console.

The rear of the stock 2000 console has an ash tray (which I'd never use) and two fold out cup holders (shown stowed below).


I used the How-To guide found at http://sites.vwsport.com/fierrpawz/. The parts were ordered from http://www.1stvwparts.com.

I decided to go the cheap route and modify my existing E-brake handle's mounting holes (vs. buying the 2005 E-brake handle). But if I were to do it again, I'd buy the 2005 handle. It took me about 4 hours of filing, fitting, re-filing, re-fitting...and a lot of patience in order to find the right fit. It probably would have been a 30 minute job if I just purchased the 2005 E-brake handle.

Here are the after pictures.


From the picture above, you can see the slightly different angle of the E-brake handle. This is what all the filing was about. I had to "o" out the handle's mounting holes to allow it to shift 5 degrees towards the driver's seat. It turned out well, but it was a royal pain.


The rear has one cup holder, and the ash tray is gone (just fine with me). Also, it appears the cup holder slides rearward to create some sort of temporary bin in front of the cup holder (like perhaps to hold trash?). But if you pull the cup holder fully rearward, the bottom of this bin opens up....so I'm not sure it that's really its intended purpose. Oh well, I don't sit in the back, so who cares.

When it was all done, I actually gained one cup holder, bringing the grand total to 7 in my Jetta! The nice thing now is that when I stow the LCD screen, I'll still be able to use the in-dash cup holders, so I'll have 4 usable cup holders in the front seats.

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