Did you read the latest article on the heart keychain? If not, you might want to before reading further to understand the history behind making this bottle opener.
In short, the bottle opener presented here is my second shot at making it. The first shot ended up being the heart keychain…a well ended project, but not at all what I was going for.
I have made various bottle openers in the past, but none of them had a punched hole like this style has. I have seen these in various photos online and wanted to give it a try, but haven’t until recently.
A couple weeks after making the heart keychain, I decided to give another try at making this bottle opener.
I used the same metal stock that I used for the heart, I just cut off the end that was fullered down at the bottom of the heart to give it an end that was easier to work with. This made the end square, just a bit shorter now than the six or so inches it originally was.
I used the exact same method as the heart keychain to punch the hole, but I thought through this more and did what I should have done and described in the heart keychain article…I used the horn of the anvil to enlarge the hole to the size I wanted. It worked perfectly.
Probably the most important piece here to remember is to work the ring around on both sides and occasionally flatten it out using the face of the anvil and hammer.
To make the depressed lip that grabs hold of the bottom of the bottle cap, I used the same round tapered punch that was used to punch the hole. I have seen others made with what appears to be a rounded punch instead. Both appear to be acceptable.
After the hole portion was created successfully, I gradually tapered the back edges of the handle some to give it some shape, kind of a fish tail type taper.
The line down the middle was simply added by using an old chisel while the bottle opener was red hot. It was all eye-balled down the middle of the handle and is probably five or six chisel widths in length.
To give the handle some curvature, I reheated the handle to a nice red heat, dipped the opener portion in water so it does not bend when shaping the handle over the horn of the anvil to the curvature of my liking.
That is it. That is all there is to it. Much more easier than I thought it would be and it is a lot of fun to make.
Some possible finishes:
If you want to give this a nice finish to help protect the metal, you can warm it up in the fire once again, but just warmer than you can touch it, not red hot, and rub some beeswax on it or go for a 1 part boiled linseed oil and 1 part paint thinner and rub on with a cheap paint brush. So far, these two are the only finishes I have tried on my projects and they work pretty good. They both can give the metal a blackish color as they burn on.
Conclusion:
In all, this project was pretty simple once I figured out how to enlarge the hole without an extra large punch that I once thought was needed to accomplish this.
This would definitely make for a great beginner project for those who are looking into starting blacksmithing. It does not take many tools, let alone anything too special or costly.
Subscribe to this blog to receive an email when the next article is written. I will soon be writing about the next bottle opener I made and the one special item I scrounged up one day knowing that it could be used for blacksmithing, something that it was not meant to be used for, but worked great in a situation like this.
Until next time!