DIY in India

I like to do my stuff, on my own. Stuff like cleaning the house, washing my clothes, trying to repair my own gadgets, and so on. And I like to learn about how to do one’s own stuff, which means a lot of browsing through instructables, makezine, and off course youtube. I will give you a few case studies and tell you the practicalities involved.

Some time back I saw a video to cut beer bottles to make glass bottles. The idea seemed superb. An empty beer bottle destined for the garbage bin gets another life after it is cut. While we can sell it to a kabaadi vala for 2 rupees a bottle. But as a glass it would at least be worth Rs.15. More importantly doing something with your own hands and seeing the result come out, gives a satisfaction next to none. The first method I tried was the tying a string around the bottle soaked in a flammable liquid. The idea is to locally heat the bottle where you want to cut it. The challenge here was heating it only on a very narrow area, as close to a line as possible. And which is next to impossible. So the results were all haphazard cuts. Anyway, then I found another way which required a glass cutter. You think finding a glass cutter in hyderabad would be easy job? Indeed it would be for people who have business in glass. Not amateurs who want glass cutters for cutting glass bottles. After trying 5 hardware stores, I gave up. Found a cheap glass cutter on ebay and ordered it. That method did not work very well too. It required a propane blow torch, which I tried to substitute with a candle. Again the crack was much better than the string method, but still unusable.
Later found I found yet another method using jubilee clips. Here comes the next problem in hardware sourcing. Most of these niche hardware have local names. I asked around and nobody understood what a jubilee clip was. I explained describing what it was and how it was used. 4 of them said they did not have them. The fifth one too said he did not have them, but on looking around I saw it hanging in a bunch, on his shelf. Anyway, I got the jubilee clip, and using it I could make a deeper score on the bottle. And this time the cut is almost perfect.