Bottle Opener

My partner Alisha and I began by thinking of bottle openers that we had seen and how they worked. The opener could either slide over the cap, attaching to it then pulling it off or it could slide under the cap then pop it off. We decided that out approach would be to pop the cap off from the underside. The basic design of was a 'tooth' to go under the cap and a part that goes on the other side of the bottle (we later discovered that we wanted this second piece to be on the cap- we would get better leverage that way). About half of our designs followed this formula with modifications - number of teeth, placement of teeth, would the handle allow us to push up from the bellow or would be pull from above. One challenge with these designs is that we needed thick Delrin for the structure to be strong, but we needed a thin tooth to fit under the can. This meant that we would have to shave the material down after laser cutting. 


We chose our three final design after looking at which we though would have the best leverage. After making  a Pugh Chart, we decided that the most important criteria would be effort. We settled on the 'Vampire' design, finalizing how it would fit on the cap, the angles, and the shape of the tooth after filing it down. We realized that two teeth would not give us the the leverage we needed and that the end of the opener had to be on the cap. We revised this design to one centered, wide tooth, a wider handle, and having the end of the opener be midway through the cap. We also added a thumb whole which we hoped would create better leverage by allowing us to use our whole arm instead of just the wrist and palm.



Prototype 1
Photo stolen from Alisha's blog 

After we finalized our design, we began working on SolidWorks. I have worked with a program similar to SolidWorks before so this part was fun. We measured our prototype and the bottle for our final sketch to make sure the dimensions were right. Once the final sketch was ready, we laser cut the bottle opener on the second thickest piece of Delrin. When we initially tested it, I had a feeling it wasn't going to work. The initial design required a thin, filed edge on the tooth. Filing the Delrin took longer than we anticipated. We kept testing the design to no avail. Terrified that we had failed, Alisha and I began coming up with new designs. We thought about how we could get the thickness to work on our side. Doing this would reqtuire looking at the material from a different perspective. We came up with a design that looked quite similar to the bottle opener used in the that SolidWorks video from class. The tip was getting cracked from failed attempts. In the end, we shaved the lip of the the tooth down enough that it finally opened the bottle. We had to adjust the way we held the bottle opener to get a good grip and good leverage.

If I were to do this project over again, I would have designed the opener from the side rather than the front. That way we could use the thickness to out advantage and have a sharp tip without any extra work.