Graduation gift designer hopes to open more than just bottles

Hamish Carter has developed a graduation themed bottle opener, which he hopes will open new opportunities for his future.

Carter, 23, has welcomed himself to the world of ‘big boys Lego’ in his final year of study, and developed a prototype of a graduation themed bottle opener with two other engineering students.

The Waikato University students aim was to create a product to the point in which it could be made.

“You give me 50k I’ll make it now,” Carter says.

“I love design and building things, ever since I was a little fella, just playing with Lego, now it’s sort of like big boys Lego,” he says.

The aim was to produce bottle openers to be handed out at events such as the Fieldays, O-Week and graduation.

The bottle opener that Carter’s group made was designed to look like a graduation trencher.

Carter said they are focusing on graduation and want the hat to be a memory jogger of the time spent at university.

“When we put it on top of a bottle, the hat sort of makes it have a personality, that aspect makes it quite cool,” he says.

With a flexible design in mind, the colour of the hat, tassel and the writing could be easily changed to market it to other universities.

The group hopes to make an interactive website that would give the customer an idea of what the hat would look like.

“I would hope that on the website you could have a 3d picture of the hat, so you can rotate it right around, you would have a couple of different locations your logo can go and the colour scheme would be adjustable,” he said.

Carter said that they have a sample of the material that they hope to use and have built a prototype and tested it.

“We 3d printed some models for dimensional analysis, to see how well it will fit the bottle, does it feel right in your hand? Is it too sharp? That sort of aesthetic side of it,” he said.

The bottle opener has been designed to last at least 1000 bottles.