Dzień dobry!

A friend of mine from Warsaw Poland was curious to know about this little tool I used to get the glue bottles opened. I use a lot of Titebond glue and getting the bottles open sometimes can be really a pain. Especially once the nozzle gets a little full of glue and starts to dry up a little. So, I came up with this little tool that I used to pry open the cap. And I did this because for the longest time I’ve been using a pair of needle nose pliers to do this and while that works it tends to chew up the nozzle is really bad.

So with the right tools this really is about a 10 or 15 minute project. And it’s going to save you a lot of time.

By the way because I was focused on doing this for my friend in Poland it’s all done in millimeters. So good luck to all you imperial guys in translating dimensions.

Tools and Materials

This is a perfect project for a piece of scrap. For this project I used a piece of Maple that I had laying around that was salvaged from an old headboard. Salvage wood can be easily found if you wander around on trash day because there’s quite a few people getting rid of old headboards and old dressers. Usually if they’re old enough they’re made out of some really good wood. You do have to watch because some of them are nothing more than flake board.

Layout

There’s not a lot to laying this project out. All you need to do is decide how wide you want the tool, mark the center line, set the whole center, and start cutting and drilling. Now as I said the attached sketch is dimensioned in metric. To all my American friends you may need to do some actual measuring to figure out what the dimensions are. Or just use a conversion on the Internet. Because I didn’t have any good metric measuring tools I used my Mitutoyo calipers. Generally these turned out to be perfect for making something such as this tool because it’s not very big. It does point out the fact that I probably should get some more metric measuring tools.

Cutting

Because I was starting with a large piece of Maple I had to do some initial cutting which was primarily cut to length and then cut to width.

Drilling

Once your piece is cut to size you need to go and mark the center for the yoke and the recess. With that done go ahead and drill the large hole first which is the recess. Then using that center take the smaller drill and drill all the way through.

More Cutting

Now that you have the holes in place go ahead and start cutting. You will need to use a bandsaw or a hand saw and cut in two places tangent to the hole to make the yoke. Once you’ve done that be sure to test it out on the glue bottle to make sure it fits. If it doesn’t you may need to use a file to make it a little larger.

Also, at this point you can start cutting the shape of the handle. You could just leave it into a square block but I prefer to put some curves in mine to make it easier to handle and make it look a bit nicer.

Sanding

Because the bandsaw leaves some rough edges I took my bottle opener over to my oscillating belt Sander and cleaned up all the size and the edges. You can do the same thing with a hand file and a little bit of time.

Routing

With that sanding and shaping done I took the part over to my router and put an eighth of an inch round over on all the edges. This softened everything and gave it a much better feel in my hand.

Final Sanding

I did do some final sanding on this using 150 grit and then 300 grit sandpaper just to give it a really nice feel it also took off a few of the rough engines that were leftover from the routing. I didn’t bother with any finish on this particular piece because I didn’t feel there was any need I didn’t throw a quick coat of wax on it but that was it.

I have to say this is a great little project it came together very quickly and it’s super useful for what I need. This little tool makes it much easier to open the glue bottles it makes my job far easier and far faster. I hope you take a few minutes to make project like this because I think it will improve your shop and improve your work.