This article was taken from the original CigarBoxGuitars.com archives.
You’ll need
Wine bottle with long neck
Glass cutter
Masking tape
Dremel Rotery Tool with grinding stone bit (optional)
1. Take a piece of masking tape and wrap it around the base of the bottleneck, making sure one side of the tape makes a perfect circle. This will serve as a guiding line for the glass cutter.
2. Using the glass cutter, scribe a solid line around the bottleneck, following the masking tape’s guide line. Make sure the line does not break or get choppy by going up or down the bottleneck.
3. Remove the tape.
4. Take the bottle to your kitchen sink and run very hot water over the scribed line on the bottleneck for at least 2 minutes.
5. (Here’s the trick) Then change the tap water to cold and run bottleneck under the stream AND TAP ON THE SCRIBED LINE WITH YOUR FINGER or the metal ball end of the glass cutter. Slowly rotate the bottle, allowing the water to hit every part of the scribed line. You should eventually hear or see a crack along the scribe. The bottleneck may even fall right off. (You may want to place a kitchen towel in the sink before this step to keep a falling bottleneck from breaking.)
If there is no crack, repeat steps 4 and 5.
6. If it cracks but the bottleneck does not fall off, take hold of the neck and snap it off (just like breaking a chicken’s neck).
7. (optional) Dry off bottleneck and use Dremel Rotery Tool grinding bit to smooth the edges of the cut glass. -or- If you want to keep the slide “authentic” to blues history, take it outside and smooth the edges on your sidewalk. Be careful not to chip off too much in the process.
Viola! You have your own true Blues bottleneck slide.
Don’t get mad if your first one doesn’t break right. This happens from time to time. Keep practicing.
Thank you for the slide process information, I just discovered the cigar box diddley bow (one string) about two weeks ago. I made my first one string diddley bow with in a couple of days of discovering the instrument, made the body from a vintage cookie tin that had been in the family for 50 years it turned out great sounds great. Then I took a pretty blue wine bottle and made a nice glass slide with the first try, the slide works and looks great. I am waiting on an order from CB Gitty at this time, ordered a Red Biddy one string cigar box guitar with a couple of pickups and other things. I really enjoy watching Shane…
I have made a few slides from bottles, but my favorite slides are the ones I make from 3/4“ PVC tubing. I just cut them to length and sand their ends and I’m ready to go.
I also make slides but I have found stainless steel tube works better for me
(I had no luck with glass )
I found a boat shop that was going out of business picked up 15 ft for nothing
used felt to fit to smaller fingers
as far for glass I broke every one I tried
I wanted it to work and I still have a bunch to try later
will be following these directions as they are slightly different than I tried
and thanks steve I will be looking for that bottle cutter
and chuck it in my drill press to smooth, genus!!!
I will use that on my steel ones
I've been making my own bottle neck slides for a while now. I spent a few hours making a bottle neck cutting tool out of some scrap one by twos, shower door rollers, all thread miscelaneous nuts andwasher and of course a glass cutter. I had some success but mostly ended up with cracked bottle necks. I got a bottle neck cutter from Amazon and followed the directions and have greatly increases my success rate. I polish the cut ends on my drill press. I drilled a hole through the cork. Ran a screw through it chuck it up in my drill press. Slide the neck on it a use some sand paper and water. Takes about tree minutes to…