Bottle Opener Part I.

DAY 1

Our first task of the semester was to get in touch with a skill that we may have buried deep within us: creativity. I know for me that skill is rusty. We learned that by practicing brainstorming, we can hone in our creativity. We first brainstormed different ways to solve the problem of having to walk through snow-laden sidewalks as well as for wheelchairs to go through such paths.

We were then presented with the our first project of the semester: creating a bottle opener. The first thing my partner, Sara, and I did was brainstorm for a few min. We were able to come up with about 8 designs.

Sara's designs on the left and mine on the right

We debated between choosing the hook-like bottle opener type or the type with a rectangular or circular opening in the middle for the bottle cap to go in. We ultimately decided to create the hook-like bottle opener and came up with this design:

Final bottle opener design 

We then created our foam core model and we found that cutting curves in the foam core was more difficult than we anticipated. But after a few minutes of struggling between making sure we were cutting through the foam core and attempting to make the curves smooth, we made a very rough but nice little palm sized bottle opener.

Foam core model

DAY 2

Using the foam core model as reference, we started drawing our design in SolidWorks. This was another task that proved to be more difficult than we thought. We first tried to draw one rectangular part and cut out the curved parts of the bottle opener but that did not work out too well. We then decided to draw the bottle opener in different parts and after approximately two hours we succeeded in drawing the curved part of our bottle opener.

Curved part of our bottle opener

We decided to make the larger end of the bottle opener that is supposed to rest on top of the bottle cap longer and flatter so that it can hopefully better hug the bottle cap. We then also changed our design for the handle to be a little wider so that one could better grip it and so that it would be less likely to break. 

Handle of our bottle opener

We met again over the weekend and we finished creating the handle and curved part and have tried to merge and intersect and weld and combine the two parts but we're not too sure if they really are connected because a line is still being shown between the two bodies. We decided to leave the two parts hopefully "intersected" and see if they really are joined together when we create our bottle opener using the laser cutter. 

Final SolidWorks design of our bottle opener