A Beer-bottles Chandelier

I spent a lot of evenings under my 3 x 3 meters wooden gazebo with friends, having dinner or talking about this and that, sipping a good glass of wine but sometime also drinking good beer.

In the upper central part I have installed a lamp that gives a lot of light, but also attracts a lot of insects, making it unpleasant to sit and chat. So I made three pole-mounted lamps (see the Instructable A Terrace Wooden-base Pole-mounted Glass Jar Light), but a friend of mine asked me why not change that lamp with a nice chandelier, perhaps made with the beer bottles we had just emptied. 

The idea wasn't that bad, so I started thinking about how to build it.

Material used:

• A round bamboo base
• Three threaded lamp sockets with socket ring
• Three emptied bottles of beer
• Three metric M10x1 threaded tubes 60 mm long
• Three M10x1 nuts
• Three flat washers
• Three rubber gaskets
• Three E14 LED bulbs about 4W - 2700k
• A decorative chain
• Six eyelet hooks
• A small electric junction box
• An electric plug
• Few meters of electric cable
• A drill with bits
• A glass cutter
• A soldering iron
• Sandpaper
• Safety glasses

Where was I supposed to start? Certainly from the bottles because they were the most delicate part of the project. The beer was brewed in Alsace and the bottle has a swing top closure system. First I removed that closure system, and then I cut the bottles bottom part using a glass cutter.

Internet is full of tutorials on how to cut glass bottles. After throwing away many bottles cut in different ways except the right one, I used the welder system which consists in placing a soldering iron on the mark left by the cutter. It works quite well and you can get a sufficiently correct cut, but you have to do everything with a lot of patience.

I then sanded the freshly cut glass with fairly fine sandpaper, to avoid unpleasant finger cuts or dangerous glass shards. As you work with glass, always protect yourself with gloves and safety glasses.

I have to say that this operation is not that easy to complete. The last photo shows one of the cuts gone bad.

After bottle cut I modified the swing top closure system to make the bottle holder hook, cutting the small white plastic part that supports the orange sealing rubber. In this way I avoided supporting the bottle, the bulb and the lamp holder with only the electric wire.

Over time and with the stresses due to the bottle weight, it could come off, causing short circuit and maybe thousands of pieces of glass scattered all over the place if the bottle falls to the ground.

Imagine if this happens while you are having dinner on the table below...

I then used a lamp holder with a fixing ring to which I screwed a 60 mm tube, threaded M 10 x 1. This allowed me to fix the lamp holder to the neck of the bottle. I also inserted a rubber gasket preventing the metal parts from coming into direct contact with the bottle glass.

The bottles were ready.

I bought a round bamboo cutting board with a 28 cm diameter and 1.7 cm thick as upper support. The same type I used for the pole-mounted lamps.

I fixed three eyelet hooks at 120 degrees to each other, where I placed the support chain for the wooden base. The eyelets were placed at a distance of 20 mm from the edge. 

Then I fixed three more eyelet hooks, also 120 degrees from each other but 60 degrees from the first three, and on the other side of the wooden base. At each of them I placed a chain to hang a bottle from. The eyelets were placed at a distance of 40 mm from the edge. Close to each of them and toward the centre, I made a hole for the passage of electric wires.

I cut the three chains with different lengths, consequently the bottles were positioned at three different heights. This ensures that the bottles are more distant from each other and do not collide in the event of oscillations caused by the wind.

I then arranged three pieces of chain to hang the chandelier, modifying an old chain ring I had.

Lastly I mounted the structure to check for errors. seeing that everything was correctly in place, I fixed a junction box on top of the bamboo base and connected all the wires.

In the end I screwed in three beautiful 4w warm light olive bulbs which, through the glass with different shades of brown, make a beautiful light

It's cute, isn't?

I hope you enjoyed my Instructable. Feel free to leave your comments and feedback in the comment section.