The main concerns I had about the material we were given to make our bottle openers, Delrin, were that the force of prying off the bottle cap would cause the bottle opener to break and that since we were only laser cutting the material out, I had to design the opener in such a way to fit under the rim of the cap and over the top of the cap. Given these constraints, the most logical strategy was to use the material length-wise rather than width-wise since the thickest piece we could use was only 1/4", a thickness that would most certainly break under any sort of pressure. However, I did attempt to design some openers that used the width rather than the length of the piece to fully explore all options.
My next steps were to figure out the optimal method of taking the cap off. It seemed readily apparent to me that there needed to be a leveraging part that held down the bottle cap while the bottom of the cap was pushed upward to create a malfunction in the cap. Since this part of the design seemed set, I set out to figure out a design for the bottle cap which eventually led to the concept of dragons or dinosaurs.
Between my partner and I, we originally created a dragon that was a simple, horizontal opener. However, we decided to curve the dragon's back in order to provide the user with a more ergonomic fit and add an additional artistic element to it. We were slightly concerned that the curve would interfere with the ability of the user to open the bottle if it were too curved and the mouth/bottle opener function could not fit the cap. However, it became clear that it wasn't an issue for our design.
Physics:
We were briefly introduced to the physics of levers. It became apparent that there were certain factors that we could control - length and material geometry. We also recognized that there were other factors that we could not - material strength, how the material moves under stress, and force since there was a minimal amount of force that needed to be applied to get the cap off. As such, we tried to maximize the strength of the material by using its length rather than width and keeping the length relatively short.
3D Software:
I took an IAP course at MIT in January on product design that taught us how to use Rhino to build our products. At first I wasn't completely sold on the program - there's some learning curve to figuring out where everything is in the program first. However, my favorite function of it became the ability to type in whatever command I wanted and its hints as to what it needed to complete the function. As someone who's interested in user interface as well, I thought that this feature skillfully allowed more advanced uses to quickly access whatever they wanted without having to search for it in the toolbars or drag their mouse to the other side to complete the action. The silent prompts for what information it needed to complete the function, however, catered to more intermediate and new users such as myself and ultimately helped me figure out how to use many of the different functions.
As of now, I'm not completely sold on SolidWorks. I think I'm just not familiar enough with it to like it but I do have a friend who has promised to help me learn how to use it. Apparently there are keyboard shortcuts that will probably mimic the type-in function so I am excited to learn how to use it in a more efficient way.
Build:
Our first laser cut of our design was surprisingly satisfying. My partner and I were pleased with how everything came out (the laser cutter accidentally scorching the body of it was actually a bonus that we weren't expecting). However, I think our design came out slightly smaller than what we thought it would be. More specifically, the body of the dragon was much smaller than what we were expecting but the mouth piece/the bottle opener portion of it was accurate to our initial measurements. Because he was so tiny but adorably fierce, we decided to name him Smaug.
Smaug in action
Perfect fit!
The mouth dimensions worked perfectly since the bottom portion hooked under the bottle cap perfectly while the top portion of the snout provided enough force downward to allow the cap to bend. However, Smaug's snout snapped off after a few successful attempts at opening caps. I later determined that the triangular shape of the snout distributed the force rather poorly in that area since it placed a huge strain on the peak of the nose and ultimately caused it to snap.
Iteration #1:
To address that problem, we created a rounded snout to distribute the force. We decided to name this iteration Toothless since he was more adorable than fierce.
However, the dimensions of the mouth and entire bottle opener were somehow altered in our iteration which yielded an imperfect fit in the mouth and twice as large body. He ironically started losing his bottom jaw because the mouth was actually slightly too small to fit the bottle cap comfortably between its jaws. However, the larger size yielded a more ergonomic and comfortable fit.
Iteration #2:
We carefully adjusted the mouth measurements to accurately reflect Smaug's snug fit and inadvertently made the opener about the same size as Smaug . As a result, Special was born and named because the laser cutter had problems and melted its back.
Iteration #3?
Although Special works pretty well, if I could reiterate it again, I would make the bottom jaw a little thicker to provide a more stable-feeling opener. I would have also increased the body size to that of Toothless to make it more ergonomic
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