Circular Beer Bottle Carrier

prusaprinters

<p>I don't have much storage space at my place and always hated how bulky traditional beer trays were, so when I got bored and thirsty at the same time the other day, I designed this compact minimalist version.</p> <p>It holds the bottles by gripping them around the neck just below the head. Since the bottle head usually has a bigger diameter than the bottle neck that starts just below it, the bottles cannot slip out downwards. The clamps are spaced far enough apart so that the bottle bodies have some air gap between each other.</p> <p>Of course not every beer bottle in the world has the same shape and dimensions. I was focusing on 0.5 liter bottles and aimed to cover the most widespread shapes in Germany in this category:</p> <ul> <li>Longneck type (Beck's, Warsteiner, Jever etc.) - ✔ fits safely with some give</li> <li>NRW type (Franziskaner etc.) - ✔ fits tightly</li> <li>Euro type (Augustiner etc.) - ✘ <em>does not fit</em>. I've tried modifying the design so it can at least hold this type of bottle exclusively, but getting such bottles out of the clamps is impossible without (partially) breaking the bottle seal. The neck angle is just too steep to allow for a clamp design that does not have these issues and yet is rigid enough to hold the bottles in place during carry.</li> </ul><p>Your mileage with other brands and sizes may vary.</p> <p>A few prior experiments with rectangular designs (handle in center, rows of clamps on each side) were scrapped for various reasons regarding structural strength and resulting object dimensions. I surely haven't checked all possible variations and perhaps there actually is a feasible alternate design, but all the variations I was able to think of and evaluated didn't work. Anyway, I went to a circular design, which should cater to most popular printers as these usually have a near quadratic build plate.</p> <p>Since I'm an enrolled university student, I got a free license for Autodesk Inventor, so that's the software I used to convert my paper doodles into an actual 3D model.</p> <p>The design is pretty much fully parametric; it will generate a model for an arbitrary number of beer bottles and has nearly every other dimension configurable as well (shape/measures of bottle neck, spacing between bottles, minimum handle length, clamp inner diameter tolerances, clamp opening angle, etc). Designs for more than 6 bottles are too big to print on a Prusa i3 though.</p> <p>If you are loading the carrier with less than six bottles, make sure you balance out the positioning of all the bottles as good as possible. E.g. if you load three bottles, leave an empty clamp between each bottle, or with two bottles you would want to load them at exactly opposing sides.</p> <p>Easiest way to load bottles appears to be straight pushing them through the clamps from the bottom upwards, easiest way to unload I've found was grabbing the body of the bottle and pulling it outwards (or inwards) like a lever.</p> <p>Being a German (Bavarian even) who does some engineering to create something beer-related makes me fulfill a whole bunch of clichés at once here, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯</p> <p>Prost, cheers and на здоровье!</p> <h3>Print instructions</h3><p><strong>Structural strength seems to not be enough when printing with a 0.4mm nozzle.</strong> Also depending on other print settings even 0.6mm nozzle prints can break; you have to make sure your Z offset and interlayer adhesion is very good.</p> <p>I have gone through a couple of print settings variations and ended up with this for my own carriers I am using regularly:</p> <ul> <li>0.6mm nozzle</li> <li>0.4mm layer height</li> <li>Perimeters: 3</li> <li>Infill: 20% Honeycomb</li> <li>Top solid layers: 4</li> <li>Bottom solid layers: 4</li> <li>No supports</li> </ul><p><strong>You have to print with PETG</strong> as the clamps require some flex which PLA prints simply cannot have. Use your usual print bed prep method (for the PEI sheet of my Prusa, that'd be wiping with window cleaner). You might observe slight warping in some places, but the whole thing will print just fine. <strong>Ensure that the clamps consist solely of perimeters and no infill, else they will not be flexible enough.</strong></p> <p><strong>High-quality filament is strongly recommended.</strong> I have different brands of PETG at home, and a print using one of the cheaper ones did actually break pretty quickly - luckily not during carry, but during unloading - while my other print with Prusa's Jet Black <i>(unbranded back when I bought it)</i> still holds up perfectly, and it's seen regular use since about a year now.</p> <p>Printed object dimensions:<br/> <b>199 mm x 186 mm x 20 mm</b></p> <p>With those dimensions it is unfortunately too big to be printed with the Prusa MINI. Neither reducing bottle spacing nor even the amount of clips was sufficient to bring all dimensions below 18 cm.</p> <p>Printing time and material consumption (V3, 0.6mm nozzle, on my Prusa i3 MK3S):</p> <ul> <li><b>~ 4 hours 26 minutes</b></li> <li><b>~ 156 grams</b> of material (~ 51 meters)</li> </ul>