This blog is for my extradepartmental 160, Introduction to Engineering Class.
For the next few days we were instructed to design a bottle opener, cut it out of foam board, draw it using a computer program called SolidWorks, print it out on sheet plastic, and repeat the process until we had a working bottle opener.
I've never actually thought about the process of opening a bottle before this lab.
After thinking about the process of opening a bottle, I realized that the only bottle opener which I have used was this little metal device which looks similar to this:
However, this contraption only works because it is made out of metal and it has that nice bend in it.
As I was constrained to using flat sheet plastic, it would take a lot more Google searching and more thinking to come up with more ideas.
In all of our ideas, we were inspired to make our bottle openers easy to use and handle. A bottle opener, however pretty it may be, is useless if it is too cumbersome to ever be used.
Idea 1:
A key.
However cool the idea of a bottle opener that looks like a key is, it isn't doable given my constraints. To make it thick enough not to break, starts looking less like a key. Also, if it is small, it is also hard to handle in your hand; if it is big, it looks silly, which is contrary to the premise.
Idea 2:
A man.
To use, you hold his body and open the bottle with his mouth. His torso is the same size as my palm. I added arms and legs and sketched in features to make him look like a person. However, the problem with this idea is that it is not as robust as other designs. Opening the bottle depends on the sharpness of the plastic around his mouth; once you open a few bottles, the plastic might start to erode, causing the device ineffective.
Idea 3:
Easy General Use
{picture of sketch to come}
This idea could work. However, the main functionality is in the three-dimensional handle, which is impossible to do in sheet plastic. We would need to do something like wrap the handle in duct tape. However, without the handle, it is just a boring, normal bottle opener, which is against the spirit of this lab.
Idea 4:
Ergonomic
After making the first three ideas, we went to different teams and showed eachother our ideas. One team had a bottle opener with holes in it for fingers, and this design was inspired by their design. However, we only used that idea as a springboard, because holes that are big enough to fit my fingers might be too large for another person to use comfortably and too small for another person fit her fingers in. But, I thought that bumps instead might be a better option because bumps discriminate on less dimensions. My lab partner, Deepika, and I also tried out this option and even though my fingers are considerably fatter than hers are, it was still comfortable for both of us. (However, we didn't try with anybody with bigger fingers. If it doesn't fit bigger fingers, we could call it a women's bottle opener. We are at Wellesley after all.)
After sketching we cut the device out of foam board.
Our first mock-up was a great first attempt. We learned from this foam that the part that goes on top of the bottle cap needs to angle down a bit to open the bottle easier. Also the part that goes under the bottle cap needs to be bigger as this one crumbled quickly and was hard to keep under that bottle cap.
After making many other mock-ups too pitiful to post here, our last mock-up looks like this:
All of the mock-ups had essentially the same handle. However, note the difference in the top curvature of the device. The only thing that worries me about this new mock-up is that a weak spot exists, as demonstrated by our mock-ups braking in similar spots; this spot is right from the vertex of the angle up to the top of our bottle opener, a bad spot. This seems to be a design flaw because numerous new foam mock-ups all have the fault in the same place; however, it might be because this inner angle is hard to cut out of the foam using an exacto knife, in which case it shouldn't be a problem when using plastic.
We'll see on Day 2.
