Beer Bottle Opener with Magnetic Cap Catcher
If you drink a lot of beer or have a lot of people over who drink beers, why not use this as a cool party trick? If you don’t drink, build this anyway and start drinking soda out of glass bottles so you can use it.
In this case I made mine with some scrap walnut and maple. You can just use a 3.5”x8” board and paint it or stain it. If you’re putting it outside, you might want to consider using cedar since it will hold up better in the elements…paint also works well outside. Here are a few other examples.
Materials & Tools
3.5” x 8” Board (Hardwood, Cedar, Pine, whatever your heart desires)
1-1/2 inch Stainless Steel Screws
Large Neodymium Magnets (1.25”x1/8” disc)
1.25” Forstner Bit (Do not use a spade bit)
Notes:
The screws that come with the mount are crap. Since they are likely to get wet, I’m using stainless steel screws. If you’re putting this outside, they’ll hold up better than zinc screws. The 1-1/2” length is for using the same screws to attach the mount and screw the board into the wall, or where ever you’re putting it. Use the appropriate length of screws. Don’t use a spade bit as I’ll explain later.
I started out by ripping down some scrap walnut and to be completely honest, this was supposed to be a picture frame. But, I cut the maple too thick and the border would look weird. I could have cut down the maple into thinner strip but then it wouldn’t be wide enough. So, I had wanted to make a mounted bottle opener and decided to do that.
I broke out my thin strip cutting jig from Rockler to cut out the maple. You just set the width, put your board in between the fence and the jig, make your cut, slide the fence over using the new board width, cut and repeat. When cutting very thin strips, such as, one eighth of an inch, it gives a much cleaner cut than trapping the tiny strip up against your fence...or at least my cheap fence. I’ve been able to glue up these strips without any issues. Before, I’d cut them against the fence and had to make a jig to run them through my planer. You could use a drum sander but that’
Glue em up…
Next, I used the opener to mark the holes for mounting, then traced out where I wanted the magnet. The magnet hole is drilled out on the backside close to the bottom. It need to be inline with the screw holes of the bottle opener so it will catch the cap when it falls.
Using a 1.25 inch forstner bit on a drill press, I set the depth to drill as close to the front side as I could without breaking through. You don’t want to use a spade bit because the point on a spade bit is much larger and you won’t be able to get the magnet close enough to the front of the board to catch the cap. You can also use a drill, just keep checking your depth once you get close. Then I drilled out holes for the screws. These are drilled all the way through so the bottle mount screws double as the screws for mounting this to the wall.
Finally a glued in the magnet, sanded and added some finish.
I didn’t have anywhere to mount this just yet, so I’m attaching it to my workbench just to test it out.
It holds 5-6 caps at maximum but unless you’re lazy, you’ll clean them off before then.
This is defintely a novelty item but it's a cool gimmick to have for a party. It's much easier to use a handheld opener, which I also made one of those. I'll put a link link when that video is up. I was pretty happy when it caught two caps in a row since I dropped a few by hand before installing the opener and it didn't go so well.
