My Bike Has Accessories! (And you can too): The Cupholder

~Because I want to help those who, like me, responded to questions about what accessories I wanted to get for my bike with "Oh...right. What?" And because I always really liked show and tell in school.

Internet, meet my cupholder:

Low-tech but super-useful, thanks to a little ingenuity combined with the fact that Bike Pimp doesn't much clean out her garage. Yes, it is a cup with holes punched in it.

Why I wanted it: Why do you ever want a cupholder? Because there are drive-thru windows in the world - and while it turns out your average McDonald's worker doesn't really expect to see a bike at the window, they'll usually still serve you. Because sometimes you aren't done with your morning coffee when you go to work. And because sometimes you find a random cool wine glass at a garage sale and don't have any other way to carry it (true story, btw).

Intended use: Holding cups. I suppose that one seems fairly obvious this time around.

I've definitely needed to do this while biking before, especially biking in town. Plus one memorable time at a trailhead when the wind blew the cap to my water bottle right out of my hand and into some nearby evidence that a horse had taken a rather large dump earlier in the day.
The cool thing about this one is that it works! That probably shouldn't be so exciting, come to think of it, but it is. It doesn't seem like something you'd easily find at a bike shop, and if you did, you'd probably end up paying what I've come to consider the Pretentious Bike People Tax. So a little MacGyver-ing seemed worth a try. Much like anything on that show, you never quite expect it to work out very well (although in the case of my cupholder, I was less worried about leaking plutonium than spilling coffee). But in its plucky red plastic fashion, it succeeded despite appearances and in no way dumps coffee, diet coke, or anything else I choose to put there.
In fact, it doesn't tip over at all, so when it rained one time I had to wait three weeks for the little puddle that collected to just evaporate on its own.
There's probably some quip I could make, but I don't have the energy to think of it. Guess I need to go biking for some more coffee. Good thing I have me a cupholder to put it in.

Alternate uses: The fun thing about a cupholder is that it holds things that aren't cups. For example, my iPod and my phone. Funny how that works. It's pretty common for me to have my headphones in and this little cord appearing to tether my head to my cupholder because my iPod is in there.

Cost: If you happen to have a friend that has a large cup with a leather thong threaded through it lying around her garage, it's free. Or you could rig something up. I'm not saying everyone has to be cheap in the same way I am.
If you'd rather try the retail route, the cheapest bike cupholder I could find online was $8, but most of them were closer to $12, if not $20. The most expensive was $30, but it had a U-bolt base (whatever that is) and was "self-leveling." Yes, turns out you can make even a cupholder complicated if you put your mind to it.

Worth having? : Yes, though I wouldn't say it's worth spending $30 on.

If you've ever tried to take a drink and continue pedaling before, you've spilled on yourself and almost crashed before. Plus, for all they're handy, those little water bottle holsters (fyi, I'm pretty sure you're supposed to call them something else, though God knows what) are pretty impractical for oversized containers, containers with lids that don't screw on, or really anything but your most basic water bottle shape and size.