Fun Stuff

EDITOR NOTE: This is a reprint of a series entitled Just the Tip authored by Thomas Brobst. His ‘make-do-with-what-you-got’ and ingenuity makes for interesting reading and maybe help a poor soul out of a perplexing repair. See if you agree with me this is fun reading.

Just the Tip
Tip #5

Hello again, faithful readers! It’s time for me to dig into my kludge bag of tips for this month…. let’s see what I got. Ok, here’s an easy and simple one but highly useful. It works great in my MGA but I suspect it will work in most MGs. Don’t know about other marques but the Brits seemed to do things pretty much the same across a lot of marques so I’m hoping it might be useful to non-MG people, too. It’s a phone/GPS holder. Well, not so much a holder but a holder FOR your holder. Hmmm…. ok, so the problem that this Tip solves is exactly where to conveniently mount your phone/GPS so you can see it and still see out the windshield. I’m a short little bugger and I struggle just to see over the dash. I actually cut down the height of the center, rearview mirror by a whole inch so I could see over it whilst making right-hand turns! So the last thing I wanted was to plaster my new large format Android phone in the middle of my windshield with a suction-cup style phone mount. I wouldn’t be able to see a dang thing on the road! So here’s my tip. I cut a thin (.09in[2.3mm]) piece of clear plexiglass/lexan/polycarbonate to about 3x7in[76x178mm] and slid it under edge of the tunnel carpet leaving about half of it exposed onto which I stick a suction-cup style phone mount. Easy-peasy!
It puts the phone, which I use for navigation with Google Maps, right down there under the dash so it’s easily readable... being out of direct sunlight ...as well as close to the DC power socket (aka cigarette lighter) with I secretly mounted way under the dash so as not to ruin the beautiful originality of my MGA dashboard. There’s a coupla photos of showing what it looks like and how it all fits together. You can even see my fancy-schmancy dual DC power sockets, one of which is insulated with reversed polarity so I could use it back in the days when my MGA was still positive earth. (Warning! If you want to copy that idea make sure you never, EVER, let the bare metal plug that goes into your cell phone touch anything metal on your car or sparks and fire will ensue. Yikes!) Another nice thing I like about this little tip is that, when I’m not using it, the piece of plexiglass, that it, it stows away neatly in a door pocket and takes up almost no room. Frankly, it becomes kinda hard to find. Maybe it would better off bright orange than clear?)

So, that’s my month’s tip! If you have any tips you would like to share just email me at thom-as.brobst@gmail.com or call me at 610-462-5039 or email our esteemed editor Greg at mgracer53@aol.com. Till next time!

~~ Tom Brobst