Cold Ones - Shotgun Tool
Cold Ones is a tool to allow you to shotgun race 5 beers with your closest friends. Created and developed after winning the 2021 CADathon Design League with this product idea.
Update: This product has been knocked off by a few companies including one called the Chug Buddy. I think it’s a special honor to make a product good enough to be ripped off!
Introduction
In January 2021, I and four engineering buddies: Alvin Matthews, Cole Elford and Mark Coates competed in the 48-hour ‘CADathon’ at McMaster University against 380+ students between 78 teams from 14 countries. We won 1st place in our category to “design a novel and exciting drinking tool”. After the competition we had the opportunity to develop the product further for a few months to iterate the design for a larger market launch. During pre-sales we sold 50 units in 56 seconds showing the demand for the product.
In my mind this has always been a wacky project but as a team we did apply strong engineering fundamentals to iterate and improve the design from ideation to launch.
Prototypes
The intial idea we generated at the design competition had 5 cans and used latch tabs to mate with a central body as seen in the image below.
Jan 2021 - CADathon Render
Over the next few weeks we experimented with various packing factors for the cans for both functionality and aesthetic. Ironically, after designing, printing, and testing all these different designs our final design still had 5 cans!
Various packing orientations of Cold Ones
Testing
We tested for many weeks various different puncture tip geometries to find the optimal hole size, strength and ease of 3D printing.
Additionally, we iterated continuously on the mechanism used to constrain the motion of the lid. We settled on this clever pin and slot mechanism that would allow for constrained up/down motion but also allowed for rapid assembly/disassembly of the lid and spring with a twist of the lid below its unsprung height. This ensured the lid would never accidentally fall off during travel or use and allowed for cleaning of the internals.
Various packing orientations of Cold Ones