As a christmas gift i got a new tin to store a different brand of single portion coffee pads for Senseo machines in. Those are the kind of attentive and useful gifts i really love and appreciate the most! They are used and enjoyed regularly, instead of just collecting dust in some closet. Every time you use them, they remind you in a positive way of the person who gave them to you and put a big, bright smile on your face

The old coffee pad tin consists of three parts:

• A tin can body with about the same diameter as the coffee pads. This is in order to keep a vertical stack of pads from falling over.
• A tin can lid.
• A lifter – see the exclamation mark in the picture below – to ease the retrieval of individual coffee pads from the tin can body. The pads are put in a vertical stack onto the spiral made from wire at the bottom of the lifter. The horizontal top part of the lifter acts as a handle by which the lifter and the vertical stack of pads is pulled from the tin can body.

All three parts are shown in the following picture:

The new coffee pad tin is from a different manufacturer and only consists of two parts – a tin can body and a tin can lid. It was unfortunately missing the very convenient lifter described above – see the question mark in the picture below. So there was nothing to put the coffee pads on and pull them out of the tin can body for an easier individual retrieval. Instead the tin can had to be shaken until one coffee pad fell out or topped over to get the whole stack out. Usually this resulted in the remaining pads not being vertically stacked anymore and instead being wedged together in a pile, which in turn hindered the subsequent retrieval of pads from the tin.

The new coffee pad tin is shown in the following picure:

In order to remedy this deficiency i decided to do a little low-tech DIY. So i picked up a spool of thick metal wire (Gardol Gartendraht Classic, length: 25m, diameter:1,8mm) at the local hardware store for €3,99. Together with the tools shown in the following picture:

i made a replica from the lifter that came with the old coffee pad tin. The original lifter shown on the far right was used as a template. The yarn second to the right was used to measure the lenght of wire needed off the spool of wire, shown on the left side of the picture. This was done by following the contour of the original lifter with the thread and then measuring the length of the straightened thread against a straightened portion of the wire from the spool. A length of about 50cm of wire was used, so the cost of material was about €0,08. The pliers shown second to the left in the picture were used to cut off the measured piece of wire and to bend around the sharp cutoff edges of the wire. They were also used to hold and form the straightened piece of wire while bending it into roughtly the same shape as the template.

The result was a lifter replica with roughtly the same shape as the original. The following picture shows them side by side. The replica on the left side and the original on the right side:

Now, the new coffee pad tin has also three parts, same as the old coffee pad tin:

Two more pictures. The fist one with the lifter replica in action in the empty new coffee pad tin:

And the second one with the lifter replica in action in the new coffee pad tin filled with a few pads:

Enhancing the new coffee pad tin by the simple means of a self-made lifter added even more value to it than what has already been described at the beginning of this post. It provided for a very enjoyable do-it-yourself time, the pleasurable feeling of accomplishment and success and the outcome is something that is very useful in everyday life. Best gift, ever