This week’s project was a fun one. I’ve been playing lap-slide guitar for a long time. After college, I put it down for a while, and then picked it back up again 10 years ago or so when I was strictly making electronic music, as a way to make some music that was much more immediate. While my heavy Shubb-Pearse bar works great for a real slide guitar, you really need a hollow slide for playing electric guitar, and I didn’t have one anymore, so I decided to make my own glass bottleneck slide this week.
34/52: DIY bottleneck slide from chromedecay on Vimeo.
If you decide to try this at home, PUT ON EYE PROTECTION before you do anything else! I wear glasses, and I still put a pair of safety glasses over them so I’d have side shields and shatter protection in front of my eyes.
To make my DIY bottleneck slide, I took an old wine bottle, gently clamped it in a vise, and used a Dremel with cutoff wheel to score all around the neck.
After scoring it all around the neck, I gently tapped the body of the bottle with a hammer, and the neck broke off cleanly.
The edges are quite sharp still at this point, so I swapped a grinder/sander attachment onto the Dremel and went to work, smoothing and grinding down the sharp edges so it would be comfortable on my finger.
I made my first one of these on Tuesday night but didn’t take any photos to document the process, so I made another one this afternoon and shot the pictures you see here. I’m planning on giving one of them to another friend who plays electric guitar. Here are the finished products!
