Bottle Opener 1/2

The first step of our bottle opener creation process was brainstorming. We came up with several very different ideas. 

Here are a few ideas on one paper. The top left design has a circular hole on one end of the opener. The hole would go over one end of the bottle cap, hooking under the edge, and then the user would push down on the solid end to remove the cap. The bottom two designs have slightly different shapes, but are both meant to be inserted under the edge of the bottle cap at one end and then pulled up or down on the other end. The top right design is similar to a wrench. One end, a semicircle with the same diameter as the bottle neck right underneath the cap, would slide onto the bottle neck. The user would then exert a downward force on the handle to remove the cap. 

This design has two arms with teeth in order to grip the cap. One arm fits under the edge of the cap and the other goes on top of the cap. The user pulls up on the handle.

 This design is an expansion of the above design. It has a longer top arm in order to provide more leverage. 

This design is a third variation on the above two designs. The top arm curves around the top of the bottle and hooks under the other side of the cap. 

Ultimately, we chose the wrench design. After thinking it over, we decided that it would be very difficult to to get the measurements for the semicircle just right so that it would fit snugly on the neck of the bottle.

We modified the wrench design, changing the semicircle to a V. The V would allow for variations in bottleneck diameter and be easier to slide onto the bottle. Here is a foam model of our design.

After checking how the foam model fit on a bottle, we narrowed down all of the dimensions in order to draw our part in SolidWorks.  We decided that a wider handle would be less likely to break. 

Here is our first bottle opener. It was unsuccessful. It couldn't open the bottle, and if we applied too much force, it would begin to chip, We believe that it did not have enough contact area with the bottle cap and that it needed a stabilizer on top of the cap.