Okay this is where I continued from the last post about the bottle opener. To recap, on Friday we already had a working bottle cap opener. However we wanted to make it better. Thus we made a different version of our bottle cap opener in SolidWorks with the edges rounded. To round the corner is to fillet the corner.
However that was not the biggest development to our design. New developments happened in our class. Our partner Callie, left us because she got into another class that she wanted more than this class. And in another group, two other people in a 3 group team left the class. Thus, my partner and I, added a third person the leftover person from that group to our group, Marissa. She brought with with her her own team's design design, which was very similar to a design that we have recently considered, but had decided not to pursue.
Their design was for a c-shaped hook to grab underneath the bottle cap and lift the bottle cap off of the bottle
We three, the leftovers of two groups of six, decided to combine our two ideas. Their group after all initially thought they were going to have two bottle openers one on each end of their Delran. They decided against it because it would take a lot of time to develop two designs, and you only really needed one bottle cap opener. However since we already had already done much of the work to get to working bottle cap opener, we thought it would be fun to combine the two working models of bottle cap opener
Thus, began the process of combining our two designs.
We struggled for a while trying to decide how to combine the two ideas in SolidWorks. Initially we were thinking of just placing one on top of the other in assembly and then exporting it as a DXF file. However we came to the conclusion that since our design both needed to be modified somewhat that it might be easier just to redesign one of the designs to include the other. We decided to use my original team's SolidWorks design extended somewhat and create the combination two ended bottle opener.
Meba had already made some changes to our design. These designs changes were splines that allowed for curves in the outside structure. They were were added to improve the aesthetics. When we tried incorporating the new design into SolidWorks and then adjusting the width of our design. All of the splines went kind of crazy. We got some really really wacky shapes. This I found out later was because of a lack of constraints. But one of the shapes that we did get was as lovely curves that we thought looks like a usable bottle cap opener and looks like the beak of an eagle. We decided to keep that in our final design on the same end of Marisa's bottle opener. So strangely enough our bottle cap opener actually has three bottle cap openers. How's that for an ambition?
We added some changes to Marissa's design. Her design initially was a little too short in its lifting action and so most of the force was actually used in deflecting the bottle cap and changing the shape rather than lifting it up from the bottom. We decided persuaded Marissa to increase the length of the non hook edge in order that the pivot point be farther away from the center of the bottle and more towards the edge of the bottle. We added those changes to our SolidWorks design as well.
It should be noticed that we added many of these these changes Thursday night, the night before our final presentation. We had initially planned to meet all together and three people on Wednesday morning at 8:30 a.m. because that was the only time that all three of us could get together on Wednesday. However, only Meba and I showed up on Wednesday which is why we ended up using our design as the base.
On Thursday we finished designing our piece, but as we were about to print, another group's piece caught fire in the 3D printer. That was kind of exciting. I was at the sink where the rags were, and because nobody cried fire, I didn't understand the rush and anxiety of the person ordering me to get her a wet rag, Then we had to wait at least half an hour to clean up and cool down the laser cutter, before we could print our design, so we spent some time to redesign our piece yet again.
We eventually did get our design printed.
This is the eventual result:
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