Introduction: Beer Balance

We always had the problem that when we were sailing and the boat went skew our bottles of beer felt. This makes the boat sticky and besides that we didn't want to spill the beer. So I decided to design something that would hold the bottles straight.

Step 1: Milling the Parts

First thing you have to do is milling each part. In the supplement there's a Solid Works file and I also added some Illustrator files which you can use for the milling machine.You may have to change the sizes a bit so that each part has enough space to move free. The big part where the bottles has to stand in consist of more layers so that you can mill them as well.

If the illustrator file is not working well, you can make a drawing of it in Solid Works and once done you can save it as a illustrator file (.ai)

Step 2: Assemble the Parts

Once you have all the parts you can assemble them. Most of the parts are easy to assemble. The only difficulty will probably be to put the big rings together. To do this you have to drill holes at both sides of each ring. These holes has to be in one line with each other so that they can make the movement which you can see in the second picture. After that you can fix the rings in different ways. You can use small pins to fix them but you can also just use small screws. In both ways you have to make sure that there's enough space between the big rings or else it wont be possible to move. You can solve that with just some small iron rings between the big wooden rings (fourth picture)

Step 3: Varnish the Wood

One last thing you must do to finisch the product is to varnish the wood. This way it will be resistant to the water.