If your house is anything like mine, you do quite a bit of wine bottle recycling. Instead of just chucking those empties into the blue can and forgetting about them, you could take those still useful wine bottles and use them in all sorts of cool projects around the house.
But how? Cutting glass is a fairly involved process that requires specialized tools. It’s easy to see how one may be a little nervous when embarking on their first glass cutting experiment. Fortunately, it’s easier than it looks, and today we’ll cover everything you need to know about learning how to cut wine bottles.
What You’ll Need
There are a few different ways of how to cut wine bottles. You could purchase an expensive cutter made specifically for the task, or you can use some basic tools and a little bit of science knowledge to get the job done.
If you’re like me, and you want to get the job done as inexpensively as possible, here’s what you’ll need:
- Glass cutter
- Work gloves
- Safety goggles
- A jig (more on that later) or an industrial hose clamp the size of the bottle
- Various sandpaper or sanding blocks
But, if you’d prefer to have a tool specifically made for cutting bottles, here’s some of the top bottle cutters available right now that you may wish to consider.
Step I: Building a Jig
To ensure a perfectly straight cut around the bottle, you’re going to need to build yourself a jig. If precision isn’t important to you, you can forgo this step altogether.
There are two ways you can go about doing this. You can either build a proper jig using some scrap pieces of wood and a woodworking clamp, or you can take a trip to the hardware store and pick up a hose clamp large enough to fit your bottle.
To build a jig, take your glass cutting wheel and sandwich it between two pieces of scrap wood. Drive a screw on each side of the cutting wheel to lock it into place. Take another piece of scrap wood and butt it up against the end jig you’ve just created so that the new piece of scrap wood forms a 90-degree angle with the rest of the jig.
This jig will help you score a perfectly straight line around the circumference of the bottle.
Recently, I’ve learned a hack for this step that saves lots of time. Go to the hardware store and buy a hose clamp that will fit your bottle. Place the hose clamp around your bottle at the point you’d like your cut to be, and tighten it enough so that it can’t move (but not so much that it breaks the bottle.)
Now, when you cut the bottle, you can follow along with the “line” that the hose clamp creates to achieve perfect results.
Step II: Scoring the Bottle
With your jig created, you’re now ready to score the wine bottle.
If you created a wooden jig, place the bottle in the jig so that the bottom of the bottle butts up against the scrap wood, and rotate the bottle so that the glass cutter you have installed in the jig can score the glass.
If you opted to use the hose clamp method, take the glass cutter in your dominant hand and start your line along the edge of the hose clamp. Rotate the bottle slowly as you score the glass until you’ve completely gone around the entire glass.
The deeper your scoreline, the cleaner you can expect your cut to be. So, you may want to go back over your line another time or two to make sure it’s deep and well defined.
Step III: Heating the Glass
Glass doesn’t do well with extreme heat and cold. When it’s exposed to these conditions, it’s much easier for the glass to weaken and break. We’re going to use this fact to our advantage to finish “cutting” our bottle projects.
Once you’ve scored the glass, you’ll want to heat up some water in a tea kettle or pot. You want the water to be at or near boiling for this step.
With the water at the proper temperature, slowly pour the hot water over the glass bottle at the line you’ve scored. Rotate the bottle slowly as you pour to ensure that the glass is heated evenly.
Step IV: Cooling the Glass
Once you’ve heated the glass, you’ll want to immediately cool the glass. The drastic temperature change will cause the glass to break along the weakest point of the bottle, which happens to be the line you’ve scored.
Take the glass and pour ice cold water over the scored line. As you do this, you should hear a cracking sound, similar to what you’d expect if you poured a drink over ice. Once you hear the crack, take the bottle and gently twist or pull apart the bottom of the glass, and it should separate nicely along your scored line.
Step V: Smoothing the Edges
Chances are, you’ll have some jagged edges on your glass after it’s split in two. Start with low grit sandpaper (80-100 grit) and begin sanding off any burrs or sharp edges (be sure to wear gloves for this step!)
Work your way up to higher grit sandpaper (200-400 grit) to achieve a perfectly smooth edge on your project.
Wrapping it Up
There you have it. Learning how to cut wine bottles is much easier than it seems at first. A few simple tools, a bit of patience, and a bit of basic science knowledge are all you need to turn your empty wine bottles into beautiful works of art for your home!
