The British Shottie Bottle

by Shottie Builder

I just finished a shottie session a few hours ago, I'm having another one in a while, so if you wanna learn how to build the perfect shottie, listen up...

HOW TO MAKE A SHOTTIE BOTTLE

ESSENTIAL ITEMS:

1) a metal tube (a bong tube is ok, but most are a bit too long and you may want a wider tube. The tubing from umbrellas can be good, as can a friend in the plumbing buisness)

2) a plastic bottle (theoretically you can build a shottie as big as you want, but it's conventional in the UK to use the smaller soft-drinks bottles. Not the big 2 litre ones, the little hand-held size ones that come in different shapes depending on the brand.)

HOW TO DO IT

Using a lighter, you heat and eventually melt a small part of the bottle, about a quarter of the way up (if you want me to be exact, I have a 23cm long Coke bottle with a hole 6cm up from the bottom, and it works perfectly.)

All you anarchists have melted plastic before, you know what happens... it starts to buckle, then kind of melt apart. If you keep turning the bottle and lighter around, you should melt a roughly circular hole in the bottle. Make sure it is smaller than your tube. As soon as the hole looks big enough to force the tube through (don't make the hole then put the tube in, melt the plastic and force the tube through.) This should ensure that the hole is just right for the tube.

Now fill it up with water to just below the hole, and insert your tube. Figure out how far in you need it to be. It obviously needs to be submerged when the bottle is tilted backwards (being smoked through) but if it is too close to the bottom the tobacco 'shot' will not clear the tube, and stick there.

Congratulations, you have now made (or at least read how to make) your first shottie bottle!

HOW TO BUILD A SHOTTIE

ESSENTIAL ITEMS (apart from the bottle, which you've just made...):

1) Cannabis

2) Tobacco

RECOMMENDED ITEMS:

1) "Pokey" (a flat-ended, thin object that will fit through your tube, like a wrong-way-round pencil.)

2) "Scrapey" (something like a credit card)

3) Grinder or, even better, a sieve/tea strainer

HOW TO DO IT

Take your weed and either grind it up or rub it through a sieve or a smaller (more useful, can-be-held-with-one-hand) tea strainer.

Using your scrapey, scrape up your little pile of weed and flatten it out (coke-cutting style) so you are left with a thin layer of weed on a flat, stable surface.

Take your tube and put a small ball of tobacco in one end. Getting the correct size may take some time... but in my experience everyone has their own ideal baccy-ball size anyway. Roughly though, it should be slightly loose (not super loose, but not horribly tight and compact) and about as wide as the tube.

Place your tube, tobacco end down, on a flat surface and tamp the tobacco down with the pokey firmly, but not too hard. Then, dab it in your weed as many times as you want (with sieved weed and the aforementioned bottle size, I find a 6-8 dab about fills the bottle with smoke nicely.) After dabbing (sometimes during dabs, or even each dab) use the pokey again to tamp the tobacco down. This will make the weed stick better.

HOW TO BUILD A SHOTTIE WITH ONLY ESSENTIAL ITEMS

It can (and has been, on many occasions, by dumb british teenage stoners who forget their shottie stuff) be done without the pokey, scrapey and grinder/sieve. Here's how...

Substitute the pokey with... NOTHING! Leave a good amount of your tobacco-ball poking out of the tube and press hard into your weed. It should stick. Just don't knock the tube too hard or hold it upside down for long.

Substitute the scrapey with... screw this, everyone has credit cards... or at least something smooth and flat.

Substitute the grinder/sieve with... RIPPING IT APART WITH YOUR BARE FINGERS! But it has to be quite fine.

HOW TO SMOKE A SHOTTIE

When your tube is loaded, carefully put it back in the hole (remembering to tip the bottle back, so the water isn't very near the hole.) Hold it however you want, but wrapping your fingers around it so you are pulling the tube towards you can help with the air-seal on the hole, as well as forcing it deeper into the water. Before you light it, take a test toke. If you can suck comfortably, with some resistance, if the water bubbles well and if you cannot hear or feel any air getting into the tube except by your sucking... it's going well.

Exhale.

Start to suck slowly on the bottle, whilst lighting the shottie. If you can see it, the smoke should NOT come rushing in and plume all around the bottle, it should cloud around the bottom and build up slowly (this is a good sign that the bottle is air tight.) It helps to have someone watching, to make sure of this. The smoke behaving this way is also depended on your sucking, too hard and it drifts everywhere. Too soft and... well... it just isn't drawn through.

You can 'shoot' the shottie whenever you want to, really... But the best times are either when you first taste smoke in your mouth, or if you see the lighted shottie start to twitch, slip or straight out fall down the tube. At this point, suck hard.

You will now learn if you have 'stitched' yourself or not. A stitch is when the tobacco was too tight, or too much, or if the tube was blocked, or any other situation where, when you want to shoot, you can't because you can't suck hard enough. They are nasty... you suck and suck but it doesn't slip, you get headrush and a sore throat from the smoke seeping through. SO MAKE SURE YOU DON'T DO IT!

A word of warning... make sure your tube doesn't get wet (usually happens when the shottie is knocked over, or someone coughs/laughs whilst brewing it and sends water shooting through it.) If it does and you don't sort it out (push a ball of toilet roll through with the pokey, for instance...) it will almost certainly go out, stitch, or both.

IMPROVEMENTS TO THE SHOTTIE

1) Rubber band. You twist this around the bit of your tube that rests just outside the hole, to stop the tube slipping further in that you want and to make the hole more air-tight.

2) Bullet. A very useful little chappie. If you happen to find a little cylinder of metal that can just sit in the end of your tube without slipping through or falling out, put it to good use. You can build the shottie in this and just slot it into the end of your tube. It means long pokeys are not needed and the tube can stay in the bottle rather than being pulled out each time, risking knocking the bottle over or dripping nasty-shottie water everywhere.

3) Multi-tubes or bigger bottle. They are basically the same idea... get more smoke! You can either melt holes for more tubes, and then get them, or use a larger bottle, or both.