Bottle Squeezer

My elderly mother has started to use eye drops, turns out she is struggling to squeeze the bottle. 30 minutes after she told me about it I had fixed the problem for her, I know I could have gone online and had a plastic squeezy thing, to put around the dropper bottle, delivered the next day but here is how I went about it.

The design was drawn out on a scrap piece of 18mm marine plywood, the drawing (which I drew up when I had finished took longer than it took me to make the squeezer) shows the basic dimensions.

I had a slight complication in that mother has 2 different drops in different size bottles, I sized the hole for a snug fit on the bigger bottle.

I drilled out the hole first with a step drill then the rest of the shape was cut on my bandsaw and the whole lot smoothed off with some sand paper.

The only other part was a strip of 1mm plastic which goes inside the hole when the smaller bottle is used.

A friend saw my squeezer and said "could I have one for my mother please?" Of course she can, only a different design this time as the bottle isn't round.

I marked around the bottle onto a scrap piece of 18mm marine ply, I then drilled a 10mm hole off the end of the bottle outline. This will be the hinge so that the movement presses on the 2 flat sides rather than all round.

Then on to the bandsaw to cut the shape out.

So there it is, easy to hold and use, problem fixed!

A post script on this, my mother is absolutely delighted with this device, she says it so easy to hold the bottle in the right place, turns out she was ending up with more drips on her face than in her eyes as she struggled to squeeze the bottle!

I have yet to get the new one to my friend but hopefully it will help her and her mother as much as it helped mine :)