Ah, the Butt Hole

Here we can see the award-winning designs of our beautiful Butt Hole (and sister product: Bud Hole) in a striking Copper colour. A conversation starter, make the Butt Hole the centerpiece at ANY backyard barbeque!

Who did this?

The creators of the Butt Hole: Allen and William! We are two friends (and neighbours) based in Ottawa, working on our passion projects from our basements. What we lack in socially accepted behaviour, we make up for in sense of humour and our "in the gutter" thoughts.

Oh, and if you're not offended by any of this yet, then you're definitely the kind of people we want to hang out with, so please: send us a message!

How did this happen?

A good couple of years ago on a fine Friday evening, we (the two of us and our better halves) were heading out to a fundraising event. Neither of us truly wanted to attend this event at the time, but couldn't back out at the last minute, so in an attempt to make our evening a little more entertaining, we decided to "sample the Sweet Leaf" prior to leaving the house.

Fast forward a few hours and the two of us are high as a kite, standing around an ashtray having a cigarette. Almost at exactly the same time we turned to each another and both of us thought: This floor-standing ashtray thing feels a lot like you're dropping your cigarette butt into someone's hole... Et voila! The Butt Hole was born!

After the childish giggles passed, our brains immediately went into overdrive and we started thinking of ideas on how to design this thing and make it a reality!

Design Iterations

Pictured above (from right-to-left, of course... because we like doing shit arse about face!) you can see our very first design: A simple round disc with a chocolate starfish-esque motif embedded in the center, and two cheeks around the outsides. This unit was in use in my backyard for about a week before I decided that I was going to try and get something better.

Queue: The middle image above. Yeah, I know. This sucks! Who the hell let Homer Simpson touch my butt!? Those fingers were my very first attempt at 3D modelling human anatomy. The butt portion was good and made it to the final product eventually, but those fingers would have to go!

Finally after about two months of deliberation and design iterations, we settled on our winning design: a pair of seriously aggressive looking hands splitting apart a pair of butt cheeks! While we didn't save all of our prototypes, we were sure to save at least our "milestone" designs. While the left-most design had won the aesthetic design of the product, we still had an issue with the functional design:

All or nothing!

Above was our first attempt at a sellable product: A "topper" for the butt bucket ashtrays you can find at any Dollar store around town. While this was a good idea for a start, (spoiler: it wasn't...) we quickly realized that this was not a good idea.

First was a concern of pure practicality: The cups at each dollar store would be a different diameter. There was no way we could guarantee a "one-size-fits-all" design would work, and designing thousands of different sizes simply wasn't (and still isn't) feasible. In addition to this, we would likely face a number of legal challenges for reselling someone else's product with our own design affixed atop of it.

Our next concerns were around aesthetics. A beige lid on top of a black cup is simply too jarring. There's no easy transition, a HUGE ridge between the lid and the cup, and the cups tend to be more "matte" in surface finish where the lids were more of a more "satin" texture.

Finally we were also concerned with function: The lid was prone to popping off the cup if it wasn't an absolutely perfect fit. This was in part due to the design flaw of having a "lip" that covered the outside of the cup. (See the image to the right / below) If this lid did not grip the cup at exactly the right place, the cup would tend to fall off when the lid is picked up. Or worse: When you accidentally knock over the ashtray, your entire backyard would somehow be littered with cigarette butts until next year!

We had to come up with a solution for these issues...

The solution

We solved out design issues in two more iterations: First we designed our own cup to go along with the lid design. (Pictured above) This cup was almost the same as the current design, but we still had the problem of the lip that closed over the edge of the cup which, when dropped, would shear the inner ring of the cup (the thin part) off completely.

One final modification resulted in the version of the Butt Hole cup we are selling today: A flush top surface with a snap-fit lid to go with it. The lid is purposefully designed to be hard to open the first time. This was to address the issue of friction fitting the lid into the cup. 3D printing is imprecise by nature: We're melting down strands of plastic and squeezing the molten plastic out in... well, smaller strands... at specific locations in three dimensional space. The slightest inaccuracy in any mechanical part would result in a perfectly fitting part not being able to fit where it was supposed to. To work around this, we would print the lids first, and then each cup. As soon as the 3D printer is done with printing the cup, (it would still be hot at this stage) the lid would be "forced" into the cup. The cup would deform ever so slightly to conform to the nibs on the inside ridge of the lid, and would then be allowed to "set" for at least 30 minutes. After about an hour of "setting", I would remove the lid again and do a few more "open and close" cycles to ensure the lid is easy enough to remove by you, our customer.

And there you have it!

I hope you enjoyed this brief, and hopefully informative view into what it took to make our vision a reality. We love coming up with creative solutions for real world problems, but also to have a little bit of fun while we're doing it!

If you've already purchased one of our ashtrays, we really do wish to thank you from the bottom of our hearts! If not, what are you waiting for? Get yours today!

For those of you who have reached the end of this page, we wish to offer our sincerest thanks, and hope to see you again really soon!