Welcome to the Workshop. Down here we get freaky making bottles into slides. To help you feel at home we’ll take you through the process of making a corker of a slide – from finding the bottle to making it moan on your favorite axe.
Bottleneck Guitar Slides by Stobie & Co.
- From go to whoa.
Our bottles
To produce each original Stobie & Co. bottleneck slide we use real, recycled glass bottles which are sourced from within the southern Adelaide region. We presently have a small, local and ‘green’ network of suppliers who keep our workshop shelves stocked with variously coloured bottles, principally made using soda lime glass. Most of the recycled bottles we use are either green, blue or black, but we are continually seeking new sources and different types of bottles to produce new and uniquely sounding bottleneck guitar slides with varying tonal warmth, resonance, volume and those super cool Stobie & Co. looks.
Bottle hunting expeditions are a mysterious art. they begin with a mid week phonecall to our informants in a chosen wine region around Adelaide. Up with the sparrows on Saturday morning we’re normally scrounging through bottle bins at cellar doors by 10am. You never know if you’ll find a one of a kind humdinger, a dozen beautifully made bottles or a bin full of duds……..but you keep looking. It’s an addiction. A bottle hunting expedition wouldn’t be complete without buying a few full bottles as well. They all need to be emptied when we get home.
In the workshop
With our variety of recycled bottles collected, the process then moves to the state of the art Stobie & Co. workshop in Torrensville, South Australia, where the neck of the bottle is removed using our specialised ‘cut and tap’ technique. First scored on a kerosene cooled diamond saw and then ‘tapped’ to remove the neck from the bottle. Each separated bottleneck is then inspected for its consistency, thickness, fractures and other imperfections to ensure only the finest bottlenecks make ‘the final cut’. We call the fresh cut necks ‘Blanks’. These have been cut from the body at the longest possible point. The Blank is then labelled and stored while we find a new owner for it! Check out our range of Blanks here.
‘The final cut’
At Stobie & Co. we’ve embraced a traditionalist philosophy, which sees us hand selecting and individually inspecting each of our bottlenecks.
It also means we spend considerable time hand-grinding and shaping our bottleneck slides to the highest standard so that each sits comfortably, is well-weighted and has that Stobie & Co. silky smooth finish.
Our water fed Gem-Masta wet-stone grinder may, by some, be considered a little ‘old-school’, but at Stobie & Co. we feel it enables greater control over the individual shaping of each slide and is the primary reason we are able to produce unique, personalised and authentic Australian-made bottleneck guitar slides.
Buff’n ‘em up
During our various quests for a good bottleneck slide, we discovered that many didn’t have the finish we were after and some even had seams left on (nasty). So when we first decided to craft our own guitar slides, we committed to removing and polishing all seams to give each slide the most complete finish possible.
Polishing begins with a fine grade wet and dry sanding belt, working the seams and ends to a dull glow. The final touch is provided by a suede polishing belt and a generous helping of cerium oxide, a fine grained compound that gives our slides a jewel-like finish.
And there you have it. It takes alot of love, time and effort to make Stobie and Co. Bottleneck Slide. Our slide making technique is an art more than a science. Each slide has its quirks but we promise they all play beautifully. Each one is unique. Don’t expect laser cut slides that are identical and souless. A Stobie & Co. bottleneck slide is a one off piece of handiwork that, if looked after, wil give you a lifetime of pleasure.
Jacob.
Stobie and Co.
July 2009
