Bottle Opener

When I first received the project, I thought it was important to have a list of qualities that people look for in a good bottle opener.

1. NEEDS to be functional
2.  Preferably portable
3. Definitely won’t hurt to be good looking
4. Ergonomic?

1.From my past experience of making a bottle opener, I learned that the spacing between the anchor(where it comes into contact with the top of the cap) and the hook(where it hooks under the cap) is extremely important to how efficiently you can open a bottle. The last bottle opener I made was out of brass just a few weeks before I got this assignment.

It was functional, but I noticed that because the anchor was close to the edge of the cap, the cap was hard to bend. If the anchor was straight down the middle of the cap where it would bend more easily this would be a more functional bottle opener. After examining the spacing between the skirt of the cap to the center of the cap, my trusty teammate Hanna and I decided to set the opening at 15mm. Varying this number by too much would for sure compromise its functionality and a bottle opener is not a bottle opener unless it opens bottles.

2.We wanted something portable, being able to open a bottle at home is great! But wouldn’t you want to be the friend that’s just always prepared?!!? So we decided that the bottle opener should be around the size of a key, to just blend into your pocket, surrounded by keys(and there’s a lanyard hole). 😉    The final parameter was 70mm by 18mm, but these were unimportant to its functionality, therefore could be changed quite a significant amount.

3. Good looking bottle opener! For me and trusty Hanna, simplicity=elegance! The design we came up with were clean and simple.

(from left to right, first foam board cut(design 1), second foam board cut(design 2), first attempt of Delrin(design 3), second attempt of Delrin(design 4), Final product)

4. We did not spend a significant amount of time contemplating on if the user can open 1000 bottles in a row without getting a single blister. But when we noticed the right angles on the first Delrin attempt was an inconvenience and it somewhat affected its functionality, we simply cut them off. Which preserved the tough and simple look that we were looking for.

Obstacles: Thinking through a design is one thing, bringing an idea into the physical world in a completely different thing (is this what having kids is like?). We encountered several obstacles along the way.

1. Since I’ve only had experience with a brass opener, Delrin exposed a flaw in the design which the brass opener would never have. Since Delrin is a more fragile material, sharp edges tend to chip off. Scroll up and see design 1,2 and 3, the hook of the opener all have a very sharp angle. When we tried to open the bottle with design 3, the skirt chipped off the on the first try. The later designs were modified to resolved this problem by making the angle less sharp and the material slightly thicker.
2. We learned about the I-beam vs. H-beam example in class, and that is precisely why the base of the bottle opener is significantly larger than the height, so the bottle opener is more ridged. But what we did not anticipate is that having a non-differentiable line near where the pressure is being applied increases the stress at that point, therefore prone to failure. In design 4 there is a close to 90-degree angle near the hook of the opener and after a few bottles, we were worried that the deflection in the hook would eventually cause the hook to break. So we fixed that in our final product.

(Final drawing before laser cut)                       (Final 3D model on Solidworks)

Conclusion: Overall I am very pleased with our final product. I learned a lot about the designing process and the limitations of Delrin. I would like to make one out of brass with Larry sometime in the future if possible. Special thanks to Hanna, looking forward to working with you again.