The Shell-O in action.

For me, one of the worst problems with making eggs is cracking them. I'm always hoping I get the perfect crack that doesn't get shell inside my cooking pan, but sadly, that perfect crack doesn't happen every time. After getting super annoyed by this, I started thinking “how could I make it easier to crack eggs without getting shell in the egg?”

My first idea had something to do with holding the shell back. This idea involved enclosing the egg with an egg shaped case, then putting pressure on it with a blade to crack it, and then opening up the case with the blade pressing the shell back so it would not fall into the egg. Then I could dump the egg into the cooking pan.

I started to brainstorm what would be the best way to break the egg apart. I used knife/blade tools to cut apart eggs, and I found that exacto knives worked the best out of all of the blades. I thought that maybe you could just cut them with an exacto knife if they work so well, but a problem with that is that humans are imperfect and you don't always get a straight cut. You also can't always put the perfect amount of pressure on the egg at all times. I then started to think about devices I could use attach the exacto knife blade to so I could have something that doesn't involve human imperfection. Since the egg is circular from the top view, I thought of a device that was just a ring shape and went right around the egg, and had exacto knife blades sticking out of it. The knives would stick into the egg and you would twist it around. I liked this idea the best because it was the smallest and simplest idea I thought of. Small and simple is great mainly because people can handle it easier. 

I tested this out by making a laser cut ring and taping a knife to it. It seemed to work pretty well… except that the tape did not hold the blade in place very well. So I tested different ways of attaching a blade, and I settled on the idea of laser etching seats into the ring to hold the blades, and then hot gluing them down. This worked great, but I still had to figure out how deep the blades needed to be cutting into the egg. I also needed to figure out how many blades I needed to use. I did some testing and figured out the appropriate depth(only about x mm), the amount of blades, I tried one blade in my first test, but then four blades in my second.  It was a lot quicker to cut the egg with four blades, so that was my final product. I thought I was going to have to figure out how to fit Shell-O around various sizes of eggs because they're all different. But it turns out that the blade sticking out makes it so that Shell-O fits almost all common egg sizes -- if the egg happens to be bigger, then the cut is higher up on the egg, and if it’s smaller, then the cut is closer to the middle.

My prototype works very well, but I’m considering some ways to make it faster and with a more perfect break. To make it faster I could put a motor in it making it automatic after the press of a button. I also tested a puncturing approach that was different from cutting. This was where I had series of pins held tightly in a row and I would poke the egg with these pins to make a series of dots like in perforated paper, and then break it apart. I would like to try this with a ring that is flexible so it can adapt to different egg sizes.

Shell-O helps cooks keep pieces of eggshell from falling into food when cracking eggs. When making eggs all you have to do is put Shell-O around the egg, and twist it. When twisting, the four knives will cut through the egg.Allowing the user to smoothly separate the shell into two halves and dump out the egg into the dish/pan/bowl with no pieces of shell at all. Shell-O is small, easy to handle, and easy to store in the kitchen. With Shell-O users can say goodbye to spending five minutes digging shells out of their eggs, and can enjoy an easy omelette breakfast. An advanced version of Shell-O will use a motor to spin the blades around the egg to make it even faster to use.