Beer bottling carbonation sugar doser

thingiverse

When bottling homebrew I like to prime with table sugar, this is the cheapest and easiest accessible solution. For a while I used carbonation drops but they were a hassle to get and I dont like to need to think about keeping stock. Alternatively a simple spoon, like https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:116475 works quite well but if you have multiple bottles to fill it becomes a bit tedious and sugar starts to clump and block because of stray drops of water, etc.So I designed a funnel with a slider that drops in a fixed amount of sugar each time by filling a chamber with sugar and then letting it drop out of teh bottom with a slider mechanism. can be used to easily, neatly and quickly dose when bottling.The original design is available in Onshape at:https://cad.onshape.com/documents/e61a8f8ede8c25567348c3ee/w/0509d2718368252b104ded8c/e/bd7e102e8508a3d26bb3b983?renderMode=0&uiState=65b6d07d75a8a5702fd8b4c9I tested several sizes of the design, to get a sense of weiging consistency and quantity for a given doser volume. It is a parametric design so if you want a different carbonation or weird measurements (hello Americans :) it can be easily modified for different sizes. The parameters determine the volume of sugar that gets dosed, then the model is built around this volume. It took me a couple of tries to get the quantity right (I was looking to dose about 2.6g into 330ml bottles, which is a medium to strong carbonation). For the granulated sugar I use (generic supermarket cheap stuff) I get a bulk density of ~0.85g/cm3. I expect that number will vary depending on brand, type, etc - maybe even vary over time between different batches. I'd reccomend giving it a test run with the sugar you use to avoid bottle rockets!! Eventually settled on a sugar volume of 3.15 cm3 whch gives around 2.65-2.7 g sugar per dose.Funnel's also parametic in case you have a particularly small printer or just want to save filament.Once you get the size you want figured out, the dose tends to be pretty consistent, with an accuracy of 1-3%. YMMV!