09/11/2021
Welcome to KEITH KUPS. You may already know us as Chris Low, but more of that later.
ABOUT US
We are a husband and wife team making 3D printed items, mostly cup holders for Volkswagen vans, but happy to try almost anything.
We are based in Essex in the UK.
We started out when a relative asked us to make a replacement for the ubiquitous broken cup holders in the T5. The full pull out tray is too big for the one printer that we had at that time, so Keith designed the "saddlebag style" drop over cup holder, which we believe to be the first of its kind. As it was so successful, we tentatively advertised it on Christine's (Mrs L) FaceBook page Chris Low, and the orders started coming in. That was in May 2020.
Over the next few months due to demand we bought another printer, and another, ... we now have eight.
In September 2000 we added the Caddy cup holder to the range.
Other people were also making these and there was a free downloadable image file available. However this design had some shortcomings - the bottoms of the holes were slightly too narrow for a standard drink can to stand in properly, and the flat top section didn't print very well - so we designed our own.
This design gave us the possibility to easily offer customisation - initially just printing CADDY on top, and then VW logos in the holes. But we can pretty much do anything, and now make them with customer's own logos, names, registration numbers, business names, pets, sports teams, cartoon characters and anything else they think of.
Then a customer said their Caddy cup holder didn't fit and sent us a picture, which is how we learned about the Touran style console. This console was fitted as standard to the Caddy Life models, and is a common modification to fit one as it has an arm rest, but it has a different shape cup hole. So we designed the Touran Style version of the cup holder.
Another early addition was the "small can inserts" - provided for a common brand of energy drinks that don't stand up in the normal holes, especially the taller variants.
We have since designed and sold dashboard trays for T5 and T5.1, cup holders for Polo and Amarok, and phone holders for T5/T5.1.
We even make a version of our original T5 cup holder with a phone holder on the central joiner.
Next in line is a cup holder for T6, something that we were often asked for and will shortly have refined for sale.
Our advertised prices include second class postage in the UK. We are happy to send first class or post abroad for the difference in postage cost.
Payment is by mainly PayPal - it means we don't have to get involved in processing cards and the risks involved in having people's card details.
To date we have made around 600 T5 and 1100 Caddy cup holders.
THE TECHNOLOGY
For those of you that are interested, we use Creality Ender-3 printers. We print in ABS plastic as this has a higher melting point than PLA, so doesn't melt on the two or three hot days each year that we have in the UK.
Designs are done in TinkerCAD, and converted to print files using the Creality Slicer that came with the printers. Customisations start out in MS powerpoint, are exported as JPG files, and then converted to 3D, from where they are imported to TinkerCAD.
Christine and Keith Lomax
