Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/05/biophysicist-designs-drip-free.html
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Ah, the drip groove.
Much beloved by anyone working in traditional home construction or repair; cheaper, more durable and more aesthetically pleasing than drip flash. You do have to watch out that the painters don’t fill it up, though.
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I just use a latex nipple on my wine bottle…no drips!
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Wait…what self-respecting biophysicist doesn’t drink it directly from the bottle – or bucket?
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I wonder if this would also work on teapots.
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That was me the last time I went Wine Tasting.
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Drip free but I think that design would result in chipping. I also wonder what kind of pressure is involved in initial corking.
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Yeah, that looks like the kind of thing I would inadvertently smash while using a typical waiter’s corkscrew.
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I have no idea, but could it be manufactured as an insert for a regular wine bottle?
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Too much pressure. I bottle wine, and have become fairly obsessive about saving bottles from cork wine - even the millimetre removed from the neck to accommodate a screw cap causes the neck to break after being recorded two or three times. And voila! Landfill.
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It was tried in 1998 (and inspired by windowsills, as illustrated above by @Medievalist), but apparently didn’t catch on.
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“Why didn’t the wineries figure this out a couple of hundred years ago?”
How hard is it to manufacture on a production basis without adding significant expense?
Same reason you can buy endless numbers of pitchers that drip, drooll and let the entire stream run down the side if you don’t use just the right angle: Cheap, lazy, not enough people care or people buy what looks good (or the thing that is a buck cheaper) without a thought to what works well…
How deep is the rim notched on the bottle? Is it a possible point of failure with a torus of glass snapping off and into your goblet? Or is it a weak point when bottles are being handle by high speed mechanical devices or when the cork is inserted under pressure?
Glass is funny stuff sometimes when vibration or impact come into play. Thinner sections are weaker sections as a rule.
Damn cool idea and I hope it catches on if it’s practical…
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I know just who to get my Rubber Nipples from…
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Pfft – buy your wine by the box; problem solved.
(But srsly: If you’re putting your biophysics degree into use by saving one drop per pour…maybe your problem isn’t with the bottle’s design.)
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I’m not much of a wine drinker, but I would love to petition all standard coffee mugs to have something like that added around the lip.
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Similar concept here, but I have her drink the wine, and then . . .
My lips usually do that. #drinksfrombottle
;~}
And yet again, goon is ahead of the curve.
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You can buy “wine disc” inserts for around $1/apiece which completely solve the problem.
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It should. The principle is very basic physics. Surface tension keeps the fluid in contact with the solid surface. If the force required to maintain that connection is greater than the linear force of the flowing liquid, it will detach. By adding a relatively sharp bend underneath the rim, the fluid must overcome the forces trying to separate it from the surface (gravity and its own momentum) to stay in contact, which it can’t do using the surface tension of fluids as thin as wine or water (or, presumably tea). It’s actually the same mechanism behind centrifugal force; it’s all just vectors when you get down to it.
Incidentally, anyone who has ever poured drinks from a screw-top bottle instead of a corked bottle has benefited from this principle. The threads on the bottle make an unintentional drop groove that forces the liquid to detach instead of running down the side of the bottle.
As I understand it, most wine bottleneck styles have evolved to have precisely enough strength to survive corking with a small margin for error. This would be a function of thickness, hence the greater thickness of sparkling wine bottles. As long as the bottleneck is the same minimum thickness, the lip shouldn’t compromise the glass’s integrity. In other words, make the lip so it extends out from the normal neck glass thickness, don’t etch the groove into the already standard neck glass thickness. Problem solved.
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