Wine bottle box

[Andrei Georgescu]

I came up with this design. It's not the finished product, I just assembled it to see how it fits. What do you guys think about it?

http://i57.tinypic.com/dlqeea.gif

[gary l roberts]

I like it.... does it stay closed?

[Brian R Cain]

I like it too on the basis that it's an innovative approach to the otherwise tedious task of making a wine box with joints and hinges or sliding panels. I've been wrong with many of the things I never expected my customers to make a fortune out of such as acrylic jewellery and wooden sunglasses so when I say this talent is wasted on wine boxes, you should take that with a degree of caution.

I'm old school. I always imagined when I got into the laser market that the technology would be put to good technological use, but how wrong I've been. To explain what I mean here, I spent the first half of my life in medical physics making prototype medical equipment and when I became aware of laser cutters I thought "Wow! How useful would that have been to me?"

I had hopes in the early days of interesting high-tech manufacturers in the technology but few bit, probably only 2-3% of all my customers. I've found the most successful deployment of this technology has been in making things that don't matter that much to me. Call me a heathen to your craft if you will, but is my daughter bought me a nice pen with my name engraved on it, it would have no more value to me than had she just bought me a nice pen. I'd have been happier still if she's have bought me a 100 cheap ones in the pound shop for a quid, since they do the same thing and I'm always losing them.

Yes I admire anyone who sees a new angle for a product and this is one. Don't be disparaged by an old misery guts like me. If you can do well with it, good on you, and the same to anyone else that can make a decent living with their laser. My frustration comes from what the technology could be use for but rarely has been in my experience.

[paul jeran]

Very nice - any chance of sharing the file? :-)

I like the closure method using the ramped tabs. Do the ends get glued in or are they tabbed too?

Thanks for sharing!

[David Somers]

Brian,

You have me curious now. (I get curious a lot so just tell me to buzz off if you want. <grin>)

You said you spent the first portion of your career making prototype medical devices? And got excited with lasers thinking what you could have done with them in your previous work? What thoughts did you have that didn't pan out? Was it because of the limitations of a laser? Or other technologies that worked better for prototyping?

I was just trying to picture what you were thinking of, and while I can see a laser being one of any number of devices being used in a shop of various tools being used to prototype, I am having trouble thinking of it being a primary tool.

Would you be willing to share your thoughts about this with us?

I understand your disillusionment with how lasers are used. It does seem most of them get used for fairly mundane stuff like labels and marking and repetitive cutting of certain materials. It can do that really well depending on the material though and is certainly a good use of it. But it also seems to be used a lot for just....stuff. It earns us a living. It certainly seems to satisfy a lot of buyers. But it is still just....stuff. So I understand what you are saying and am curious where you think your vision for it as a tool failed?

Dave

[David Somers]

Andre,

The box is great. I like the softening effect of the wood hinge on the box sides. I know this is just your prototype for the actual shape. How far have you gone in your thinking after that though? For example. Have you looked at the idea of doing cutouts/piercings to adorn the box for the specific wine label that it will carry? Or for the store if it is meant as a carrier for a general store use rather than for use by a specific vintner? And you can certainly take that further with inlay or infill work to create a fancier more artistic appearance.

Another thought I had was to take two of the boxes walls (opposite walls) and extend them up with a horizontally laid wooden hinge so the top comes together in a handle. That would give the box a softer shape still, as well as add the handle functionality.

Lots of possibilities available to you! Nice job!

Dave

[Andrei Georgescu]

Thank you for your replies.

Gary, it does stay closed because the side has something like two wooden "hooks" (I would be grateful if one would tell me the English word for them - I don't even know how to call them in Romanian) pointed downwards. Due to the way the living hinge stretches, the side can slightly tilt so as to fix them on the back panel. I have made a hole there so even a person with thicker thumbs could slide it easy into position as you can see in the pictures above.

Brian, thank you for the advice. Right now I'm trying only to design products that I can do in larger numbers since I don't want to count on the irregular customers.

Paul, the top and bottom of the box are made of 8mm beech plywood and that seems to hold just fine on the only two vertical sides it's glued on. However I think about stapling it - that would at least make it faster and easier to glue the sides into place. Given the small electric bill the laser machine brings, I price my work by the hour so time is most important.
I thought about making it as a cheap enough "blank" that the average customer would afford to engrave afterwards. The material costs about $1 for each box and I will be selling them at about $4. In 6 hours one could do 40 of them.
If you would like to do an object like this it's rather simple to get the measurements right: the rounded corners are quarter circles. The width of the living hinge = 2 X 3.14 x R / 4 . R is the radius of the circle you use at the corner. The other dimensions are according to your needs.
David, thanks for the advice. Like I said above, it will be the cheap and easy base for further designs.

[Brian R Cain]

Brian,

You have me curious now. (I get curious a lot so just tell me to buzz off if you want. <grin>)

You said you spent the first portion of your career making prototype medical devices? And got excited with lasers thinking what you could have done with them in your previous work? What thoughts did you have that didn't pan out? Was it because of the limitations of a laser? Or other technologies that worked better for prototyping?

I was just trying to picture what you were thinking of, and while I can see a laser being one of any number of devices being used in a shop of various tools being used to prototype, I am having trouble thinking of it being a primary tool.

Would you be willing to share your thoughts about this with us?

I understand your disillusionment with how lasers are used. It does seem most of them get used for fairly mundane stuff like labels and marking and repetitive cutting of certain materials. It can do that really well depending on the material though and is certainly a good use of it. But it also seems to be used a lot for just....stuff. It earns us a living. It certainly seems to satisfy a lot of buyers. But it is still just....stuff. So I understand what you are saying and am curious where you think your vision for it as a tool failed?

Dave

Quite simply Dave, At the time I was making medical prototypes, there weren't any around. The hospital I worked in had a well-equipped workshop but with traditional machining facilities. We used a lot of acrylic but it needed to be machined so a job that would have been completed with a laser in half a day took several days. I think also, the way we tend to think of constructing things is based around the equipment we have. A laser would have opened the door to other means.

You're right in saying it has limited uses as a primary tool but for some applications it's invaluable. Here's an example of a product that was developed in the hospital dept. I worked in, then went into commercial production.

http://www.micromedical.co.uk/products/spareparts/parts_detail.asp?type=Micro%20Spirometer.

The pictures of the flow transducers aren't great but you can get an idea of how they work. The patient blows into the top part, the swirl spins the air causing the vane to rotate. An optical pair counts the rotations and the device computes this into a variety of measurements that will tell a doctor quite a bit about the state of the patient's lungs. The two primary measurements being the amount of air the lungs can force out in one second (FEV1) and the total volume of air the patient can expire (FVC). The most common use is to determine whether a patient has asthma or emphysema, two diseases that can present similar symptoms but require completely different treatments.

The vane is made from 0.002" mylar film. It needs to have very low mass to enable it to be responsive enough for the FEV1 test. I left the health service to produce the transducers which initially were all machined and hand built, then once sales were high enough it was possible to afford the tools to move over to injection moulding. The vane was at one time the limiting factor in how many it was possible to produce since it had to be cut accurately by hand using some special jigs I made. It wasn't possible to stamp this material out on a press and get good enough results. The company producing this device had sales orders that couldn't be met, purely due to the number of vanes it was possible to make, silly as that sounds now we are all familiar with lasers. The laser that resolved this issue was the first one I sold and to give you an idea of how relatively new the technology was at that time, ULS had only sold around 7,000 machines worldwide, maybe 300 in the UK In production terms, the machine completed in a couple of hours what it used to take a month to do, so paid for itself very quickly.

So that's a little of my background and hence my astonishment at why so relatively few of these machines get used in high-tech production. I have sold them for some applications that justify the technology that goes into them, and it was always interesting to work with the customers to perfect the ways they were used, but in the main, from my experience, the majority are being used in low-tech applications. As a guide, in order of magnitude in the UK, around 60% of laser sales over the 14 years I was in the business were bought by schools and universities, around 10% by architectural model makers, 10% by the sign industry, a few by hobbyists, a few by people making wedding stationary, greetings cards etc and a growing but still small number by people making things like jewellery, electronic clothing and so on. I suspect that since UK schools have been using so many lasers, something I understand is fairly unique in schools worldwide, the students here will look to use the technology in later life. Certainly the businesses who are keenest to own a machine and develop new uses for it tend to be run by youngsters.

[David Somers]

Thanks Brian! That was an interesting read.

On the one hand, my own interest in them in is largely in the "stuff" department. But it has struck me how shallow the range of things they do beyond that is. They certainly do a lot, but it is within a very limited range because of the limitation of the gantry and lens systems. As more people use them for "stuff" and are exposed to them through the schools and the maker communities and development of systems occurs hopefully their versatility will improve. More axis of movement strikes me as one improvement needed for them to expand their repertoire for example. Will be interesting to watch.

Thanks again for sharing your experiences! That was really interesting.

On a side note. When I lived in Hawaii I took part in several years of a respiratory study to see what the effects of vog was on people. Vog is Volcanic Fog made of volcanic particulates and sulphur dioxide emitted by a volcano, and which are then acted on by sun and moisture to produce a fog or haze made of suplhuric acid, sulphates, and other sulpher derivitives. I lived within 1.2 miles of the active vent on Kilauea, the active volcano on the Big Island. She produced upwards of 2000 tons of vog a day and depending on weather systems, we might find ourselves sitting right in the heart of its plume.

Anyway....we used inspirometers to record our lung capacity at set times of the day, and noted the atmospheric conditions and amount of SO2 in the air at the time. It was an interesting study given where I lived. So I am fairly familiar with those units from frequent use over a few years.

Thanks again for taking the time on this Brian!!!

Dave

[David Somers]

Brian,

Just remembered something you might enjoy. Here in Seattle a physician in the Children's Hospital was trying to do some research on children using an MRI. The little ones were terrified of the machine; claustrophobia, weird noises, people hiding behind glass windows, long time stretches, all made it really tough to do their work. So he worked with a local Maker Shop that had a big CO2 laser and a CNC router and used the foam insulation panels you find at big box shops to make a life size model of an MRI. I saw a bunch of photos of it and it was beautifully done. He used that along with a speaker and vibration system to acclimate the kids slowly to the setup. By the time they were brought to a real MRI they were fine with the machine and his research went great! I thought this was a really terrific and creative use of the two technologies and worth a mention to you. I also understand the maker shop was chuckling ruefully at the building full of static charged foam pellets that resulted from working on so much foam board. I applaud them for being patient and kind about that though. This was certainly a worthwhile project they got involved with and will hopefully help a lot of kids.

Dave

PS....Andre! Sorry for the side conversation but this seemed like the right time to chat with Brian about his thoughts.

Anxious to see what your next developments are on your wine boxes if you care to share them with us!

[Brian R Cain]

"I thought this was a really terrific and creative use of the two technologies and worth a mention to you."

Great story, thanks Dave.

"PS....Andre! Sorry for the side conversation but this seemed like the right time to chat with Brian about his thoughts."

Yes, me too. It's an unfortunate trait I have that being retired now, I have too much time and tend to digress into other things, but having said that, where else you you pass on thoughts and experiences other than in threads such as this one?

Back to the boxes...

[Andrei Georgescu]

No problem guys, I also enjoyed reading your stories.

[Rob Langham]

Hi Andrei,
I'm brand new to this forum and just came across this post.
I think it's a great idea. I'm based in the Hunter Valley in Australia, which is one of the premier wine regions in my country. I work with a few wineries and a packaging company and think your idea could be a winner over here.
Good luck on your refinement and selling of your boxes

[Andrei Georgescu]

I'm glad you found it useful.
A small winery didn't appreciate my design and one wine shop tried to haggle me into lowering the price since they want to sell them at 100% profit. I would have agreed on that if they would have ordered at least 100 but since I know they won't be able to sell more than 4/ week I won't sell them anything. Then asked for a free sample engraved for one of their friends. I thought about it for a second and decided to take my wife to lunch instead. We had a great time by the way. I will refuse almost all requests for free samples from now on. The client seldom wants to buy anything he or she can get for free.
So it was no deal for me yet. I'll try the biggest winery in my area and if they don't need any I'll probably sell them online on my web store among other products.

[Brian R Cain]

I'm glad you found it useful.
A small winery didn't appreciate my design and one wine shop tried to haggle me into lowering the price since they want to sell them at 100% profit. I would have agreed on that if they would have ordered at least 100 but since I know they won't be able to sell more than 4/ week I won't sell them anything. Then asked for a free sample engraved for one of their friends. I thought about it for a second and decided to take my wife to lunch instead. We had a great time by the way. I will refuse almost all requests for free samples from now on. The client seldom wants to buy anything he or she can get for free.
So it was no deal for me yet. I'll try the biggest winery in my area and if they don't need any I'll probably sell them online on my web store among other products.

It's a tough world out there. 100% profit or more is a very reasonable amount to mark up with some things. It depends on the market and how much the client has to invest to get a good price.

If it's any help, the laser customers I've had who have been most successful marketed their products on-line themselves rather than try to beat the Chinese at their game. I really have to commend one lady who bought a couple of machines from me. She had a vision of the silliest product I could imagine. Cutting heart-shaped maps of honeymoon destinations to order and framing them. When she came for the demo, she had a new-born baby with her that my secretary needed to to wheel around the grounds and make coo-coo noises to in order that I could talk sensibly to the girl and ask her not to waste her money on such a pointless venture.

Has she proved me wrong? Not only did she need a second machine to cope with the demand, but she had to move into larger premises and employ more staff.

She's expanded her range of products, of course, but never to my knowledge sold them other than directly. She's a success story, just as anyone can be if they have imagination and the will to see it through. I'd say don't waste your talent by giving it away cheaply to vineyards and retailers. Believe me, if your design of wine box became popular. you'd be pushed out of the market by cheap imitations before you knew it.

You've had an idea, develop it into your own special market. One that you can control and adapt to.

[Andrei Georgescu]

Thanks for the good advice Brian. I was beginning to suspect that myself. I'm able enough to market my own product but wanted to try this to see how it would work out.

[Michael Kowalczyk]

Andrei,
I have the same software to make the Living Hinge also. I would be very cautious about shipping a full bottle in it. Nothing worse than having a customer open the box to find your product that they paid for broken or damaged. Do some testing. Send some samples to people you know to see how the packaging holds up to the shipping obstacle course and if your product survives the journey, consistently.

OOOPS sorry I used the word "SAMPLE" but like I said in my previous post... it is a CODB or you can put it in the category of R & D

[Andrei Georgescu]

Michael,
I use Corel Draw for drawing the hinge.
Anyway, I think the board might be too thin at 4 mm. The hinge is pretty elastic but I will use 6 or 8 mm and see how it holds.
Nice fish by the way, I'm an angler myself. Tight lines!

[Andrei Georgescu]

292681292684

I've changed it a bit, rounded another corner and engraved the way it opens and closes, the system puzzles some people. You're welcome :)

[Michael Kowalczyk]

nice touch. I still recommend shipping some to test the packaging and product.
Thanks.. what do you catch in Romania? Post a pic.

[Andrei Georgescu]

Lately only small carp. A few years ago I used to go for zander and pike but I don't enjoy fishing with artificial baits as much as float fishing.

[Josh Borlovan]

Andrei, imi place foarte mult wine box. Unde in Romania sunteti?

[Andrei Georgescu]

Mulțumesc Josh. în Constanța.

[Andrei Georgescu]

Mulțumesc. Constanța.

[Jed Lawrie]

Looks great!