Since my old partner missed today, I got paired with a new partner, Carrie. Her idea was to make a bottle opener inspired by an oar; she used to row crew and thought there would be a fairly large market on campus for a bottle opener that looked like an oar. She also wanted to make a bottle opener which was small enough to fit on a keychain so people could carry it around with them just in case.
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| Picture of an oar |
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| Foam Mock-up of Carrie's oar design |
Notice how this device uses a different mechanism to open bottles. Instead of using a hook, which is useless after it chips, this uses a 3cm long curved edge to open bottles, which can still possibly be used after some slight chipping. Also notice how the curves on the device are different on each side similar to the curves of an oar.
However, this device was not as easy to use as my ideas from Day 1. So, we decided to combine our ideas. We made a new device inspired by the robustness and oar design from Carrie's bottle opener and my easy-to-handle design from Day 1 and created a hybrid bottle opener.
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| Foam Mock-up of our hybrid bottle opener |
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| How this bottle opener is meant to be gripped |
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| Our bottle opener in action |
Note: this is just a preliminary mock-up. The main change we are going to make is the location of the bumps because the current placement is really awkward.
The handle length was a compromise between my long handle and her short handle. The length of this hybrid was long enough to fit my large hands but small enough to where there was not any extra space at the end that stuck out. We also made the support on each side thicker than Carrie's original because we did not want our device to snap in half while opening a bottle. When we made our foam mock-up, Carrie diligently measured everything to be a nice measurement (an whole centimeter amount) which helped us when we eventually diagramed it in SolidWorks.
After making our foam mock-up, we started to design our bottle opener using a computer program, SolidWorks. We decided to make the top part symmetrical, a departure from the oar inspiration because with the bumps the device really did not resemble an oar. We started our handle by first drawing a rectangle of correct dimension in SolidWorks. {It should be noted that from this point forward on this project, I worked without a partner.} Then I added the bumps, and finally took out all of the extra lines. The bumps on the side took a long while to diagram in SolidWorks. To diagram them, first I measured the length from the top of one bump to the top of another bump using a previous design of an ergonomic handle which fit comfortably in multiple sizes of hands. Using this wavelength, I drew vertical centerlines of infinite length to use as a guide. Using these, I drew 8 consecutive 3-point arcs in alternating direction of the same radius. This made drawing consistent arcs of the same size more precise compared to freeform as once I created my first arc, the next would easily set to the same radius. Finally, I deleted the guidelines and then used auto-dimension to set everything in place.
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| Diagram of bottle opener with guidelines |
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Diagram of bottle opener after guidelines removed
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| Diagram of bumps with the guidelines |
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| Diagram of bumps after guidelines removed |
Alas, after I cut it out of 1/4" plastic, it was unable to open a bottle of pop. To be thin enough to open a bottle, the plastic needed to be thinner, but to be thick enough to withstand the pressure, the plastic could not be much thinner, a conundrum which renders this design in it's current state not particularly useful. I tried sanding it down, but after trying it on a bottle, my work was chipped away. However, I learned a lot about how to diagram ergonomic bumps in SolidWorks and will use this knowledge to move forward as I try to create my top design (the fourth one) from Day 1 in SolidWorks.
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| Unsuccessful bottle opener in plastic |
The next design I tried used a hook mechanism to open a bottle. I also continued to be inspired by things that are easy to hold. I was even more motivated to continue my quest for the perfect ergonomic bottle opener after googling "ergonomic bottle opener" and only finding super fancy bottle openers in the first few pages of results. Using my fourth design from the previous day, I continued on my journey.
The second SolidWorks diagram was much easier to make even though it was more involved and the foam mock-up off which it was based was not made with precise measurements. After editing it more, I made the bottom part too small and when I printed it out on the laser cutter, it bent under pressure and was unable to open a pop bottle.
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| Second bottle opener- plastic edition |
For my third iteration I made the part that goes over the bottle thicker and added a small bump. This hopefully will be thick enough to withstand the pressure. I also smoothed out the corners around the ergonomic bumps because sharp corners are against the ergonomic philosophy. After my design was cut out of Delrin plastic, I had other handle this bottle opener and they all found it fairly comfortable in their hand. [The picture below is without the smart dimensions which are so thickly defined that you cannot see my design well with them.]
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| Third bottle opener diagrammed in SolidWorks |
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| Third times a charm |
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| How to hold the bottle opener |
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| The bottle opener in use |
This design opened a bottle!
If I were to continue working on this project, I would like to have tested it until it broke to figure out how reliable this design is and where the weak spots are. I would assume the major weak spot in my design is where the foam broke when I made my foam model, but I really do not know for sure. I would also would have like to have tested it with different length and depth of finger grooves. The ones on my design seemed fine, but there might be a better fit out there. I also might make different sized grooves for different sized fingers, because my current model has uniformly sized grooves.
