ART
BEAUTY & WELLNESS
CRAFT
CULTURE & HISTORY
ENTERTAINMENT
ENVIRONMENT
FOOD & DRINKS
REVERSE ENGINEERING
SCIENCES
SPORTS
TECHNOLOGY
WEARABLES
The Spring Bottle Stopper: Let the Pressure Seal It
A cork in a soda bottle has to be driven hard, wired down, and pulled with a corkscrew, and the pressure inside is always trying to push it out.
Charles G. Hutchinson of Chicago received US 213,992, dated 8 April 1879 (filed 28 October 1878), for a stopper that sits INSIDE the neck: a rubber disc on a wire bent "to approximate the figure 8 in form", pulled up into the narrow neck to close the bottle and pushed down to open it. The gas pressure inside then holds it shut.
This rung works out the force the pressure puts on the stopper, then makes an inside stopper for a bottle and tests its seal.
Beginner
About 2 hours
Instructions
1
1
The force that holds the stopper shut
The force that holds the stopper shut
Loading Jupyter Notebook...
2
2
Where the pressure comes from
Where the pressure comes from
The embedded blueprint carbonates drinks in the bottle and warns about too much pressure. Hutchinson's stopper turns that pressure into the seal.
3
3
Read US 213,992
Read US 213,992
"In order that the stopper B may be suspended below or away from the neck of the bottle, I extend the spring C upward, and make this upper part sufficiently large to prevent it from falling down through the neck, but not so large as to prevent the lower part of the spring from passing through or below the narrowest part of the neck."
"A simple and inexpensive way of constructing a spring for the purposes set forth, and uniting in it all the advantages now recited, is to make it of flexible wire, bending the wire so that the spring will approximate the figure 8 in form".
4
4
Make an inside stopper and test the seal
Make an inside stopper and test the seal
Cut a rubber disc a little wider than the narrowest part of a bottle's neck. Bend steel wire into a figure 8, with the lower loop fixed to the disc and the upper loop too wide to fall through the neck.
Push the disc into the bottle, fill it with carbonated water, turn it upside down briefly so the disc falls into the neck, and pull it up by the wire loop to seal. Leave it for a day and see whether the fizz is kept. Measure the pressure of a sealed bottle with the gauge where you can fit one, and compare with the notebook.
Materials for this step:
Rubber Sheet1 piece
Steel Wire1 piece
Carbonated Water (Sealed Bottle)1 pieceTools needed:
Bottle Stopper
Swing-Top Glass Bottles
Needle-Nose Pliers
Pressure Gauge
Scissors5
5
A stopper that leaks, sticks or falls in
A stopper that leaks, sticks or falls in
Inside stopper troubleshooting.
Flow
Loading...
6
6
History and honest limits
History and honest limits
**Charles G. Hutchinson** of Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, filed US 213,992 on 28 October 1878; it is dated 8 April 1879. The stopper can be pulled up with a small hook through the top of the wire loop.
**Honest limits.** The notebook treats the pressure as acting on the whole disc and ignores the rubber's own grip. The pressures and disc sizes are examples. Your sealed bottle is the measurement.
Materials
3- 1 piecePlaceholder
- 1 piecePlaceholder
- Placeholder
Tools Required
5- Placeholder
- Placeholder
- Placeholder
- Placeholder
- Placeholder
Related Blueprints
These blueprints share knowledge with this one — techniques, materials, or principles that connect them in the learning graph.
CC0 Public Domain
This blueprint is released under CC0. You are free to copy, modify, distribute, and use this work for any purpose, without asking permission.
Support the Maker by purchasing products through their Blueprint where they earn a Maker Commission set by Vendors, or create a new iteration of this Blueprint and include it as a connection in your own Blueprint to share revenue.