I used a jig with a small cutting wheel to score the bottle then heat the score line with boiling ( or near boiling for thinner glass) and then dip it in water to break along the line. Polish with emery cloth or high grit sandpaper. The less delta T between the hot water and the dip water the smoother the cut. Finding your preferred Temps for the thickness of the glass is the art.
It’s technically up cycling but like, yikes. For the cost of a handle of Jim beam and a shit load of wax, you could probably just buy a bunch of candles instead, so the end goal here seems to be to showcase alcohol brands?! Is this like when people fill their house with Coke or Mickey Mouse stuff?
I suppose I’m just as confused as you are. It would make sense to me if they washed the labels off; some of the bottles are visually interesting enough to warrant making showpieces out of.
I’ve made lamps from liquor bottles. Easier to drill a hole in the bottom than to cut off the whole top. Not quite candles but probably the same basic premise.
Fill them with something - I’ve done coffee beans, crushed glass, colored beads, empty bullet casings, etc. I do usually try to find bottles that don’t have labels at all, but if it’s got a label I leave it there. That’s part of the charm, I guess, if you want to call it that.
Find visually interesting bottles with visually interesting labels and see what you can come up with. My favorite so far have been the bullet casings in a Hotel Tango bourbon bottle (military/MRE themed, looks sorts like an army canteen) and a beach color gradient of crushed glass (sand/white/dark blue/light blue) in a Bumbu rum bottle (looks pirate-shippy).
Not everyone’s cup of tea, for sure, but for me it’s a fun little waste of time to put them together and to think of ideas for what kinds of fillers would go with what kind of bottles. And it’s done as a “give one lamp as a gift to someone who would like/appreciate it” kind of thing, like the Hotel Tango one was for someone who used to be in the Army. I don’t just fill my house with empty liquor bottle lamps as a monument to alcoholism or anything. That would be super weird.
I made a bunch of drinking glasses. I used a jig to score and hot water to pop it off so it broke smooth and relatively even. Light polishing and there you go. After doing it a while I got the feel well enough to do with beer bottles which I would then drink liquor out of and shatter against the side of my house during bonfires. Unlimited possibilities
I rarely drink anymore, like maybe one drink every 6 months, except for wine, which ill have a glass of every couple weeks. But, i save all my bottles, because i fantasize about making things like this. Eventually, i, too, will have problemstic candles!
Or cider… super easy to start. Just buy the cider in US super markets that are “ascorbic acid” free. Throw in some ale or other yeast, spike with sucrose to your taste and bam! Cheapest drinkable alcohol you can find!
I made it with an inexpensive lamp kit from the hardware store! The only issue with the kit is that it leaves the cord sticking out of the side of the socket, so I used a diamond drill bit to cut a hole near the bottom of the bottle and fed the cord through there!
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