Bottle Opener Day #2

Clara and I started off the day with our two foam board designs—festive reindeer and patriotic eagle.  We conferred and decided that we would like to pursue the reindeer idea, since we were very curious to find out whether its double opener function might work.  The class had the same idea, and unanimously voted for our reindeer when it came time to market our designs.

Our foam board models

Our first experience with SolidWorks was full of trials, and (eventually) tribulations.  Drawing our design on SolidWorks took quite a bit of time, but as we continued, the program started to become much more clear to us.  At first very excited with the spline tool and the apparent freedom to create antlers that it seemed to offer us, we quickly changed our tactics and switched to arcs, lines and 3 point curves when EJ kindly informed us that defining each of our numerous spline sections would be very difficult, frustrating and time consuming.  We decided to build half of our reindeer and then reflect it over a center line, in order to make sure everything would be perfectly symmetrical.  The arcs, lines, and curves worked well for us—we easily created the face of our reindeer using a curve and a line, and then spent considerably more time (multiple hours) building and perfecting our antlers.  After defining our entire creation, we measured the distance from what would be the two points of the antlers that would actually open the bottle, and with the assistance of a caliper we realized that the distance was 3 millimeters too large.  After un-defining, adjusting, and redefining our creation, we were finally ready to send it off to the printer!

Clara and I watched in awe as the laser printer cut our reindeer out of the thickest plastic, and it was with a great deal of excitement that we popped it out of its mold.

Hot off the press!

We first tried our reindeer’s opening powers on just one bottle and were very, very excited to see the ease with which it popped the cap off.
We then moved on to test #2: two bottles at once.  Amazingly, our creation did not let us down!

Two bottles at once!

Clara and I were so excited we proceeded to print out a new reindeer immediately (so that we would each have one, and our first reindeer would have a friend).  Googly eyes and shiny noses were the finishing touches, and—voilá—our creations were complete!

The steps of our building process took a long time (about 4 hours including design on SolidWorks, printing, and bringing our reindeer to life with eyes and festive noses) but it was a very gratifying and fulfilling project since at the end we had two functional and adorable double bottle openers!