Heavy Car Key Solution!

As a few you of you may have already worked out - I have a few jobs, and with those jobs seems to come many keys. I popped them on my keyring (as one does) and after a few weeks people started making comments about how heavy my key ring was. Not to carry (although its a bit of a pain) but for the ignition of my car.

Apparently, if you have too much weight on your keys it will eventually pull the ignition out of alignment and your car simply wont start one day. To start with, that frightened me. Both the inconvenience of not being able to start my car and the bill of having to fix the ignition, and so, I separated up my keys.

Of course what happens next is that I arrived at a job unable to get in and had to drive home and get the keys (turning my initial  twenty minute drive into an hour) and then being angry and frustrated at being late/unorganised and having the rest of my day run an hour late.

So I put them in the glove box of my car - and promptly swapped cars with my husband, drove to work, discovered I didn't have my keys, drove home, got the keys and drove back to work again... Achieving absolutely nothing, adding to my frustration and the greenhouse gas problems to boot!

A solution to my key shenanigans needed to found...

Here's what I did...

My first attempt included using a piece of wire attached to the indicator stick to take the weight of the keys - this didn't go down well with the 'concerned key crowd' as the problem was now that my indicator would eventually give up under the pressure from the keys weight. And I have to admit, it popped off occasionally and the keys swung down and smacked me on the knee! Also at 100km on a country road it proved to be trick (and dangerous) to put back onto the wire. The hook is just a bottle opener keyring that I got as a present from a friends child cause it was pink and she likes pink! (Thank you Sharni!)

This Mark II version involves a stick on hook and works MUCH better!!! I tried a few suction type hooks that were lying around the house, but none of them were going to work on the textured dashboard. I ended up having to buy a pack of four for $2 from the local $2 shop and only used one - but thats all I needed to quell the 'concerned key crowd'!

For a bit of extra info about this topic I found this and this if you want to chase it up further.

Score card:

Green-ness: Not very green at all. New/plastic/single use hook - but it has saved me in petrol, greenhouse gas emissions and in tantrum energy.
Frugal-ness: $2 Pretty darn frugal when compared to replacing the ignition.
Time cost: about 15 seconds to "install"!
Skill level: Just like cutting and pasting without the cutting!
Fun -ness: Knowing that a $2 hook saved you a small fortune and makes you seem really organised - great fun!