Yesterday
2011-12-25 19:56:17.585744+01 by Dan Lyke 3 comments
Yesterday, learned how to cut and drill glass bottles with a teenager. It's probably good for society that making a good bong is difficult.
[ related topics: Drugs Children and growing up ]
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#Comment Re: made: 2011-12-27 03:16:22.827132+01 by: Dan Lyke [edit history]
So, anonymous teenager says he'd like to make a bong out of a wine bottle. Talks about all the details. Teenager is 18+ can walk into any smoke shop and buy said bong, so if we sit down to build it, we're not really crossing any particular lines.
![[Bong]](/images/upld0000/img003672.sm.jpg)
The question then becomes: How realistic is teenager's view of fabrication issues? I decide to call teenager's bluff, and we headed to the hardware store. This was a bit of a challenge because we didn't have any real tools to begin with, just a hand drill. Had this happened in my shop we could have tried a number of other techniques. Here's what we ended up with.
A few things to note:
- Cutting the bottle isn't hard, but when the online guides to bottle cutting say "don't cut deep or over-score", they mean it. Scoring deeper just provides more microfractures that send the cut off in unintended direction. And repeated boiling water poured over the crack, alternated with immersion in running cold water, eventually moves the fracture all the way around.
- Drilling the hole for the receiver was damned hard. We used a 5/8" glass/masonry bit, and ended up shattering a number of pieces before we got all the way in. Even with this one, we got through, discovered that the hole was just a bit too small for the receiver, and ended up breaking a patch off while trying to open the hole up. We glued the patch back on with cyanoacrylate, and he ended up covering the area in epoxy for texture.
- The junction between the two bottles was done with a piece of copper sleeve and some plumber's epoxy. That actually worked better than I thought it would, with two of us forming and squeezing the epoxy in under the sleeve.
- The act of making the bong triggered all sorts of learning opportunities, and was far more attractive than the use of the bong. Meet 'em on their level, with things that excite them, and they'll open up and learn. In this case we showed why bongs are so expensive, and that whipping them together out of wine bottles probably wasn't a strong business proposition unless some additional techniques could be worked out.
- The lack of my shop meant that we didn't play with a torch for burning the hole. The supposition was that we'd break the bottle with specific heat like that, but we blew away a whole lot of our preconceptions about working with glass, so would still like to try this.
- The rim around the top bottle is beeswax.
#Comment Re: made: 2011-12-27 16:13:52.106261+01 by: TheSHAD0W
You might want to branch out from this into actual small glassworking. The equipment needed isn't expensive, just a couple of gas torches and possibly a cooling box.
#Comment Re: made: 2011-12-27 18:17:51.538172+01 by: Dan Lyke
I think the next project we're going to try is, once my shop is done, to have him come visit for a week or so and build an electric guitar. Just to maintain my sanity in terms of capital equipment acquired.
What I did convince myself, and I think him, of here is that bongs are expensive because low-volume procedures take time and working with glass is non-trivial. There's no easy way to build something quality that he can sell to his classmates at $70-80 a pop and make money, even when he's scrounging the recycling bin for materials.