Bottle Scoring Jig: A Detailed Look
Here's a short post explaining how my glass scoring jig was put together, including a bill of materials. It's basically a frame to hold a bottle on rollers, one of which is a wheel-style glass cutter. It's a huge improvement over my old "design" (read: piece of junk), and way better than the leading Instructables result for this kind of thing in my opinion. You need the rollers to smoothly turn a bottle, otherwise you may end up with skipping or misalignment in the score mark.MaterialsAmazon (or other local source):
- Bearings. Mine are for skateboards, but you can use any kind really. Reference: VXB 608 ZZ Skateboard Bearings, Double Shielded, Silver (Pack of 8)
- 1x4 Pine Board, you only need about 2 feet but extra wood never hurt anyone. I feel cheated that it's really only like 0.75x3.5"...
- 5/16" Bolts, about 2 inches long but again, more is never a bad thing.
- 5/16" Nuts, always have extra, you can use them like spacers.
- 3/4" Square Dowel, you only need a few inches. Save the extra. Or improvise from your pine board. I just like this stuff because it's already square.
- Wood screws, I went with #6, 1.5".
- Washers, 1/4" seems to fit 5/16 with just a tiiiny but of wiggle room. And actually it's just smaller than the diameter of the bearings, which is perfect.
- Glass cutter (if you don't already have one).
Construction
Cut yourself a length of wood to serve as your base. I made mine 10 inches long. Cut another piece 3-4 inches long from your board to serve as the "backplate." Cobble it together however you have to in order to make it perpendicular to your base. This is where I used the square dowel to help me align everything.
Liberally apply wood screws from the bottom, smear in wood glue if you want. Cast it in epoxy for all I care. Just make sure your interface is solid.
Holes for the bolts were drilled 2 inches apart. You could probably go 2.5" apart if you're never going to score beer bottles, and only use wine bottles.
For the front roller, I did the same thing on a smaller scale. I also rounded the edges and trimmed it's height to make sure it wouldn't interfere with the bottle. Dremel <3
I drilled a hole to accomodate the glass cutter where the fourth roller would go. You may want to drill a series of holes, every inch or so, for different sized bottles/projects. Apply a little pressure on the handle, and friction should hold the cutter steady while you roll a bottle on top.
Apply just enough down-force so it sounds like you're ripping delicate fabric. That's the sound of micro-fractures forming in the glass. Once you hear gravelly crunching, that means you're going over an area you already scored. Stop there, don't double-score. You're just doubling the number of places where this could go wrong.Once you've scored your bottle, you may commence fracturing. At this point, you may refer to my previous post/video.
Update, future steps: