The Rabbit Ears Corkscrew is a fine piece of engineering and is genuinely a useful labour-saving device for opening bottles of wine. (Non-disclaimer - Contributors to this project have no financial (or other) interest in the company that manufactures this device). However, it has a couple of weaknesses:
- The corkscrew itself may wear out. Fortunately replacements are readily available online.
- There is a plastic part that holds the screw which can crack, causing the whole device to be useless. Exhausitve online searches have not yielded a source of replacements of this part.
As far as is known, there is no specific name for this part. From now on it shall be refered to it as a Rabbit Ears Corkscrew Bushing, or just a bushing.
The aim of this project is to reverse-engineer the bushing such that it may be readily available to users of 3D printers, and easily installed in Rabit Ears Corkscrews where the original bushing has failed. This project has the following specific goals:
- Measure an original bushing
- Use measurements to create a 3d model of the part
- Render 3d model into some format suitable for sending to a 3d printer
- Document instructions for replacement of bushing
The original broken part looks like this:
A micrometer was used to measure this part as best as possible, extrapolating the lost fragments.
Blender is used to build a 3d model
If 3d-prints of the object model can successfully be used to fix a corkscrew, then step-by-step instructions will be given to do this. If these instructions are of sufficient quality, then they may be submitted to a site such as iFixit.