Can you cut a bottle in half without shattering it?

ChattanoogaChop said:
I think if I tried it 50 times I'd get one that was close enough to count. I think it can be done with the right blade, edge, bottle and angle; I just don't think it can necessarily be done consistently.
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My neighborhood is boring, needs someone in a helmet swinging choppers around...
It's Sunday morning, you should be drinking that beer!
 
Richard338 said:
My neighborhood is boring, needs someone in a helmet swinging choppers around...
It's Sunday morning, you should be drinking that beer!
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My neighbors are super cool. The neighbors around my friend's house where I filmed this are all mind-your-own-business types. It's occurred to me (especially in the current political climate) someone could drive by and see me beheading a mannequin with a machete, see nooses hanging from the tree behind me, and make many incorrect assumptions about what I'm doing.
 
Any more chopp'in stuff up going on with the testing, or did you drink too much and pass out. :D
 
If you're in a hurry to open a bottle, I think it's more practical to knock the neck on the edge of a stone or brick.
 
You can cut glass with scissors underwater because it creates a chemical reaction which lowers the energy needed to for cracks to propogate by a factor of 20. The reaction causes the cracks to propogate a million times faster. It makes it more difficult for large cracks to propogate.

Sauce and full explanation(3:29 - 4:30):


If I were going to apply that science to attempt it for a video:

I would thoroughly clean a bottle.
Fill the bottle with distilled water.
Place the bottle under container such as this:
(Filled with distilled water)
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I would position it so that the distilled water would flow out of the valve/spigot into the mouth of the bottle and down the side. With the right flow rate and a little coaxing, the adhesion and cohesion properties of water would cause it completely cover the bottle and essentially encapsulate it in water.

Then try to chop it with thin blade(e.g. a grass machete) sharpened at a low angle.

With a mostly horizontal, or even slighly upward/downward, path in the swing, you might be able to cut it into two major pieces and preserve the path the blade took through the bottle. The edges wouldn't be perfect and some material would have shattered into tiny pieces, and therefore be missing, but it might not shatter the bottle.

Probably the purer the glass and the water the better. You would need a decent flow of water to avoid air gaps. You may want to try multiple thicknesses of bottles.


TLDR;

🤪You could try a suspending a running water hose over a freshly consumed, water filled beer bottle so that it's covered in water and take a swing . A thick blade such as a real sword probably wouldn't work. Try a thin, high quality, heat treated machete.🤪

If multiple tries of that doesn't work, try purer glass, purer water and/or different thicknesses of glass. I don't know if gluing the glass to a platform would help or hurt. Maybe add weight such as ball bearings in the bottom of the bottle to increase its inertia which would slow down the lateral movement of the bottle as the blade cuts through.
 
ChattanoogaChop said:
I haven't chopped any more glass since then but I imagine I'll get back to eventually. I don't ever stop chopping though...
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Okay, let's just get this out of the way.. we all know there's gonna be a zombie apocalypse eventually, I'd just like to call dibs on your team. I don't care, I can be the guy who does the nerdy radio stuff but you seem like you love chopping and I consider that to be a much needed skill when this all goes down. If it doesn't go down, how are you on a half side of beef or pork? Man's gotta eat, after all.
 
Just to actually answer the question, you can't cut/slice glass, you fracture or crack it, to actually cut the glass you will need something over 69+ HRC, and you would be scratching it and crumbling tiny dust particles away, like scraping ceramic with TC or diamond. Even if you shear off a clean looking bit of glass you haven't cut through it, just cracked it cleanly.
It's like hard toffee, if the substance doesn't flex at least 0.1% it will just crack, things that don't flex and are 100% brittle rigid structures shatter or break as soon as their structure is wedged apart then it has catasprophic failure and breaks.
People do cut into glass with very hard knives to test hardness of over 68-70+ RC. I've seen Shawn tripple B do it before, but you can't cut glass fast it will smash, you have to cut it slow, and it isn't really cutting technically, it is wearing away, like an aluminium oxide cutting disc going through granite, the granite isn't being sliced it's being chipped away at and abraded into dust.
 
Plastic bottle, most likely.
Glass bottle, probably not.
A glass bottle might be a wee bit hard on the edge, too, taking into consideration you can hone a blade edge with glass, and/or a ceramic cup.
 
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