hey everybody Adam Savage here in my cave was a a tooltip specifically about
cutting a material that is traditionally very very hard to cut as makers since
the beginning of my career whether it was in theater or in film I've been
confronted with having to modify every kind of material you could imagine
rubber steel wood plastic and glass years ago Jamie was doing a Perrier
commercial and in this Perrier commercial we had to do several things
but one of them was that we had to make a Perrier bottle fill from up from the
bottom it had to fill like blue fill full of clear liquid and the method that
Jamie came up with for doing it was actually really awesome and
straightforward but it required a giant hole be drilled in the bottom of a
Perrier bottle and just picture a glass soda bottle specifically a Perrier
bottle and you'll notice that they are not uniform and consistent these are
made by blow molding I think glass into a mold and so the insides of the bottle
are relatively similar thickness but there's a lot of variants suffice to say
that cutting of inch and a half hole in the bottom of a bottle of Perrier will
occupy be for the better part of a week and it was a freaking nightmare and I
want to talk to you about the solution I found after I did that job but I want to
talk about how I did that job so for the purposes of this story this little glass
injection vial just made a very thin or a silicate glass I think is a great
stand-in for this so I had to cut a hole in the bottom of that and have you can
see in the light reflections but like it's not a perfectly flat surface it's
not super uniformed how do you how do you cut the hole in something like that
well Jamie's advice was that I used this circle cutter here I I can feel a great
disturbance in the force makers around the world going really yeah seriously
this is what we used and the way we did it so this is a circle cutter that you
chuck into a drill press this drill bit goes into the material and then this
steel bit here carves up cart like does the actual hole cutting in order to do
it in the glass we had to remove the drill bit and with Jamie's help and
guidance I ground this feel bit to be very very shallow draft and thin so it
presented a very small profile to the glass I used tons of water and I went
incredibly slowly literally we did it in the mill not the drill press and that
allowed me to sort of incrementally just increase slightly low or my quill just
pulling out more material but it was a nightmare just picture this bit of
hardened steel cutting into glass for hours as a super high pitched awful
sound and glass dust being created and I'm using water as my cooling fluid and
in a classic bit of this is how things always turn out I successfully drilled a
hole in the furrow how did I secure my bottle right this is
a whole nother thing how did I secure an irregularly shaped object in a milling
vise I actually had to build a plywood holder for it a Perrier bottle if a
Perrier bottle has a specific feature in that it's narrow at the narrower at the
bottom than in its midsection so Perea bottle looks kind of like this so what I
did was I took a piece of wood and I cut a hole out of it that allowed the wood
to be pressure fit over this end of the bottle right and it couldn't go further
because the bottle gets wider and then I cut another piece of wood with a hole
that went here that allowed it to pressure fit on that and then I pulled
those two together and rude them together and basically built a
box around this bottle that held it as rigidly as I could possibly imagine it
being held on the drill press upside down well and I then came in and started
acting upon it and the thing you need to know about this technique is it was
Jamie's idea and it worked it worked the first time but then he said I'd like a
second bottle for insurance and that second bottle took me like five more
tries and three days yeah yeah and it'd be like the worst part is doing
something like that the failure isn't at the front the failures always towards
the very end the failure mode is as its breaking through it'll catch something
and everything goes to hell and that's what happened five times before I got
that second bottle so Jamie's greatness as an engineer is he doesn't throw
anything out as an idea his his his genius is that he ignores his own
intuition seriously in the in the pursuit of an empirically based method
for achieving the goal he has so to him to me I look at this and I'm like
there's no way I would ever want to use this to drill glass and I still don't
but the fact is it worked and it worked like I said the first try but long after
I went through the hell of this and I still remember how awful it was 20 plus
years later 25 years later a few years later after that job I came across a way
to do this thing it's much easier way way freaking easier and it's not using a
glass diamond drill although I now have some of those in my collection because I
didn't have access to those I didn't know about them and I couldn't really
afford them but there was this thing that happened in the South Bay on the if
I remember the second Saturday of every month and it was called the Foothill
College ham radio electronic swap me later it became the NASA Ames swap meet
it was the De Anza College swapped me but way back in the day it was the
Foothill College ham radio electronic swap meet and it was an amazing locus of
detritus and decommissioned military stuff and high technology low technology
I went as often as I could usually really early in the morning because all
the good stuff was gone by 7:00 or 8:00 a.m. so you would literally I would
literally get up in San Francisco at 4:30 in the morning pick up my friend
Frank and we would drive down to Foothill College to go to the swap meet
and wander the aisles and it was like man the whole portion of the 90s was
that that monthly exercise going once a month and I still have I still have some
things I bought at the Foothill College in fact this was my first fluke
multimeter I couldn't afford one back in the early 90s they were well over 150
bucks but I managed to get this one at Foothill for like $40 and I still have
it and it still works invest in good tools but at the Foothill College swap
meet I came across a guy writing his name in a crystal wineglass like using a
dremel bit to punch through the wineglass and write his name in a
delicate crystal wineglass and I was like I gotta get me some of that and so
I purchased a set from him for probably real money you know a couple bucks per
bit so like 40 bucks for a 20-bit rack of these there we go so this right here
is a double helix hardened steel grinding bit and I am ignorant as to the
actual hardness of the steel but I have very cognizant of what this thing can do
to glass and I have ever basically this bit would have made that Harry a job
last all of two hours the thing that took me three days took me throughout
took me would have taken me three hours had I had this technology at the time
and whenever I come across something like that man that gets my attention so
I would just want to show you what this can do now you're working with
aerosolized glass dust so it is a good idea to use a respirator and now I'm
gonna turn and talk while I'm doing but for the most part you're just gonna
watch me do it but I'm using a little peroxide dermal that I love so much now
I've put the bit in without a lot of a lot of it sticking out because I I don't
want too much of it sticking out if it sticks out it's even sort of the off
it'll vibrate I'll get a lot of vibration back and I don't want them so
I took this up the phone here we go watch there we go it makes a beautiful
mark on the glass
now to describe you like that my whole to be and then I go get a punch me
then again I'm pleasing up on this and I've now done is full bore but I've
taken my time but I try to be gentle
there we go it's punch through boom right there
there blew my mind when I wants to do that
I beg you destroy what go home
dude okay hold on let me kick this off here look at that
that is beautiful I listen I I long for the day when someone says we need a big
hole in the bottom of a soda bottle stat and I can go I've got the solution
everybody you can all calm down look you got to take some precautions because
you're working with glass dust etc and with something like a soda bottle like a
coke bottle or a Perrier bottle it's gonna take a lot longer to work through
this is very very thin probably thirty thousand thick glass but suffice to say
this little bit definitely does it's a little bit it's an amazing thing and I
never don't have a half a dozen um half a dozen of them in my dremel kit thanks
for watching this tool tip I hope this saves you as much time as it could have
saved me back in the mid 90s thanks for watching everybody see you next time