{"id":1513,"date":"2011-06-17T07:50:23","date_gmt":"2011-06-17T11:50:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/?p=1513"},"modified":"2025-03-22T06:36:06","modified_gmt":"2025-03-22T10:36:06","slug":"mighty-bottle-opener","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/2011\/06\/mighty-bottle-opener\/","title":{"rendered":"Mighty Bottle Opener"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been wanting something printable that I could carry around with me, especially after this Colbert Report<\/a> thing. I finally settled on designing a bottle opener: something I could show off.<\/p>\n

\"Mighty<\/a><\/p>\n

There’s already a bottle opener you can print<\/a>, and it works really really well. Unfortunately it’s the size of a small moon, so you can’t really carry it with you everywhere. The reason it’s so big is because it uses a penny to bear the load. You need to have something metal to save the plastic, and a coin is an ingenious, albeit large, solution. <\/p>\n

To make the opener smaller the coin would have to go. Using a bottle cap came to me almost immediately, but finding the correct implementation took some time. The Coin-Op uses the coin to support the full load, and initially that’s what I tried to do with a folded over cap. Things improved greatly when I discovered that ABS is strong enough to lift a cap, it just needs a protective layer to keep it from being chewed up.<\/p>\n

And thus the Mighty Bottle Opener<\/a> was born! As you can see, naming things is not my forte. I was looking for something that would encompass everything great about this new opener I designed: It’s smaller, lighter, key-chainable, yet still really strong.
\n
\n\"Creating<\/a><\/p>\n

…And then it was awful. The bottle cap barb above protected the plastic, but it kept getting pulled out by the opening process. There’s way more outward force than I anticipated. Of course I had already uploaded this awesome thing to Thingiverse, and it had gotten featured. Luckily it was project night down at Sprout<\/a> so I started redesigning.<\/p>\n

\"paperclip<\/a><\/p>\n

I settled on using a paperclip looped all the way around to the back of the opener. Now any outward force on the protector is resisted by something stronger than friction. I was kicking myself because Aaron from dinostudios<\/a> had suggested using a paperclip maybe a week before. Oh well. <\/p>\n

\"paperclip<\/a><\/p>\n

So there you go. A fantastic bottle opener and a design story to boot. We’ll see how well this design holds up. It’s still listed as a “work in progress” just in case.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: This opener never really panned out. It works well when printed in PLA, but with ABS I was never able to effectively protect the plastic. I’ve posted a new design<\/a> that works far better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been wanting something printable that I could carry around with me, especially after this Colbert Report thing. I finally settled on designing a bottle opener: something I could show off. There’s already a bottle opener you can print, and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-1513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mechanical","tag-makerbot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1513"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7231,"href":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1513\/revisions\/7231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brettbeauregard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}