Adult Baby Bottles

Edit Dec 30th 2017: The adult baby bike bottle project is mainly on hold, in favor of a more promising alternative of mason jars, which due to parents against plastic bottles, have a third party howto as well as ready kits for mason-jar based baby bottles. These work for regular-mouthed mason jars, which range up to 1 quart (32 oz), and are available in glass or plastic.

This project page is just a few thoughts and measurements at the moment.

Questions

• Should the bottle be vented? With non-vented bottles, the amount you can get in one suck is limited: The one nipple hole (or set of holes) is where milk leaves and air enters the bottle. Vented bottles have a second flow path to break the vacuum by letting air in. These may add complexity (as in the Playtex VentAire shown below) and/or a potential for leakage (as in the valves molded into some Nuk teats).
• Should the bottle be plain or decorated?
• Should the teat be larger? A larger teat would be proportionate to the AB's mouth, or the usual size, similar to the nipple size of a potential partner? (By the way, I looked up why those large Nuk teats were so hard to find, and now recommend not looking up why those large Nuk teats were so hard to find.)

Project 1 - Convertible Bottles

I share a refrigerator and would like to avoid the appearance of having a fridge full of baby bottles. I'm also a cyclist, and so have lots of bike bottles around. Having them in the fridge wouldn't be given a second thought. In the past, I'd be drinking water or Slimfast from baby bottles. Slimfast is a close and easy approximation to a liquid diet, and is milky without requiring refrigeration. However, would it be practical to have a plain bottle that could accept either a plain cap or a teat?

Baby bottles have one particular detail of their caps which complicates this. For sterilization, the cap never touches the milk: The cap presses the flanges of the teat against the bottle. For adults, sterility is less of an issue. It might be possible to pass the nipple through an undersized hole in the cap. If the size of the hole is right, it might seal around the teat. This would result in the need for two seals, but also permit the use of a teat that is smaller than the bottle. This could be avoided by finding a compatible teat and bottle, and fabricating a suitable cap.

The three better cycling bottles (marked with an asterix) had fully interchangeable caps. The Bell bottle had a smaller thread: While its cap didn't fit the other cycling bottles, the caps of the other cycling bottles would fit it. These were soft plastic, and so quite flexible. The Walgreens flip-top bottle used harder plastic, and was somewhat interchangeable with the better cycling bottles. Yes, the free bottle from Bicycling magazine was the least standard cycling bottle.

Of the few measured, the Nuk Simply Natural was the closest match to the three better cycling bottles. The diameters and pitches matched, except that the Nuk Simply Natural threads had four starts. (Most threads just have the one thread going around many times. This had four threads going around fewer times, each with about four times the pitch.) As a result, the Nuk Simply Natural cap wouldn't screw on to the cycling bottle. I cut a hole in one of the cycling bottle caps for the Nuk Simply Natural teat, but the threads in the cap weren't long enough to engage around the teat's flange.

The lid of the Nuk Active Cup didn't quite fit the Bicycling Magazine bottle, although it was close.

Email BitterGrey Last Update: 30 Dec 2017| First: 25 May 2017

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