Custom Bottle Openers

These are the bottle openers that I designed for my company. You can use this article to help you design one for your own for your company, sports team logo, or favorite character. We are going to need a CAD design software.

SolidWorks is typically around $100 for students. AutoCAD is free for teachers and students. To get it click here to get AutoCAD. If you don’t have SolidWorks and can’t get AutoCAD there are a number of other free or trial software’s. This tutorial will be done with SolidWorks.

Start a new SolidWorks drawing. Create a new sketch. Select the plane. Tools -> Sketch Tools -> Sketch Picture. Trace out the sketch picture. The final bottle opener will be a single flat piece. Remove different pieces to give the bottle opener some definition. After tracing out my image I made some adjustments because I didn’t want the bottle opener to be so long.

In areas that are potential weak add some supports. The bottle opener should be sturdy and if done well they don’t have a much negative visual impact.

Now we need to rescale the image to fit. Create a new sketch. Select all the edges (the edge filter helps). Select sketch tab, convert entities. Select all the edges. Sketch tab -> display/delete relations. Rescale accordingly by selecting all the sketch lines, right click on the background -> sketch tools -> scale entities. Also move the entities.

Find a place where the bottle opener design is going to fit cleanly in with the design. Find a bottle opener in your house and take measurements. Design the bottle opener hook to match. These parts are going to be cut by waterjet. Remove all rounds and hard corners that still remain. Don’t forget to add a hole for a key chain if you desire.

There are loads of different places to order these from. For easy online quotes I recommend Ai Machineshop for custom metal fabrication. Otherwise, other places that are eCommerce friendly and easy to use are Xometry and ProtoLabs.

I recommend having the parts made from 1/8” stainless steel, and request a smooth grain D10 finish. A D10 finish adds lots of small surface scratches into the metal to give it a smooth grain look. This is important because it will remove the scratches there are bound to happen while the parts are being cut and will hide future scratches as well.

The last step after ordering is to get your favorite beverage so that you are prepared for when your bottle openers arrives.