Laser-Cut Bottle Opener (2 of 3)

2nd Design:
We had a "meh" prototype in the first design, so my partner and I took new measurements and decided to shrink the height of the opening to half the size and add a dent in the opening for the flaps to grab on. Furthermore, as the engraving wasn't as visible as we had hoped, we wanted to challenge our aesthetics skills and create a more "Wellesley" design. We drew inspiration from the recognizable "Wellesley lamp."

In Solidworks, we created a similar opening to the first design, decreased the height and added a rectangular dent below it for flaps to grab onto it. Additionally, we looked back on our brainstorming idea #1 of the slim bottle opener with the jaw-like opening. We decided to add that to our design as a second alternative if the trapezoidal opening gave trouble. We measured the bottle cap one more time to figure out how long the top arm should stretch across the bottle cap and how long/angled the bottom arm should be in order to go underneath the bottle cap. Then, the rest was aesthetics and measuring the relative dimensions (e.g. length of the pole, distance of the lamp from the center, etc).

We sent the drawing to the laser printer and for the first time, we experienced serious dimension issues. Our prototype came out almost half of the size we want it to be:
  • the opening was tiny and did not fit the
  • the arms were too thin, snapping off against the cap
  • and the pole was so thin we had trouble grabbing it. 
We sent it over and over again to the laser printer, and each time the software would measure it to about a half (sometimes more) than what we had measured in SolidWorks. We were running out of time and needed to create a third design, trying to gain some information from the failed prototype we had.

(For the third iteration, please go to Bottle Opener III).

Comments

  1. UnknownFebruary 12, 2014 at 5:51 PM

    The sketch for this version of your bottle opener is beautiful, and the SolidWorks design shows your skill in using the program for sure!

    ReplyDelete

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