I’ve always loved Stoner Engineering. I live in Canada where cannabis was made legal in 2018 but when I was younger and smoking up the 1980-90s, us smokers still needed our smoking vessels, bongs and pipes!

We learned from experimentation and word on the street. Using cannabis was not something acceptable socially and had heavy legal consequences. There was no Internet at that time and honestly most of us smokers… we had only ever heard of or seen pictures of bongs, never really saw or used one in action. The oldheads sure as hell weren’t going let a bunch of us young, rash punks bring heat on them so they’d inform us of exactly nothing!!

We used scissors, not grinders to cut flower. We kept our weed in film canisters because fsm help us if anybody caught a single whiff. One old hippie lady I knew owned a pipe that she had hidden in a cut-out fake book. My buddy Norman made a hash pipe in grade 11 metal shop and was nearly expelled. Other than that it was joints or knives for the rest of us! I laugh as I write this - it’s from such a naive time lol

There was no such thing as online ordering and head shops were very illegal, although there was one in my city called Syd’s Carousel (great name) with a coin arcade featuring Exciting Hour and an extensive adult magazine section. Syd’s got around the law because they only sold oddly-shaped art glass (bongs without downstems, grommets or bowls). Technically paraphernalia was never illegal in Canada, but that didn’t change harsh enforcement so it was super-underground. You couldn’t even buy a tobacco pipe if you were, realistically, under 50. They would just shoo your ass out any store and invite you to never come back. So Syd’s was getting away with some shit there aha

Since nothing was going to stop me or any of my chums from smoking up, this harsh environment necessitated me getting into the fun and challenge of designing and crafting! (Basically needing to smoke and having little or no access to smoking devices, and not enough money even if we could have bought them).

Fast forward to 2024 and I still love making homemade bongs and water pipes. Now I make them for a few different reasons. First, I feel that I’ve gotten so good at basic design that the ones I made satisfy me more than standard “store” ones! I know that sounds corny and definitely subject to debate, but I love em! Then I get to give them away to friends and I often get special requests.

Second reason is that the process of mentally designing them then making them from 100% recycled material (no cost)… it reminds me so much of my grandfather who passed away in 2010. He was the most influential person in my life and so much of that was time spent goofing with him, learning how he could make literally anything from nothing, himself having come from an isolated single-father unit during the great depression.

I started carving glass bowls by hand with diamond files a while back, and in the last few years I’ve begun drilling and filing! That’s really been a lot of fun for me, and it has made me a lot more comfortable with smoking from homemade bowls. Plus now some of the WIPs glass bowls are bordering on artistic carvings and stuff mannnn that makes me happy. Glass is the safest material in my view as well. If you’re going to combust vegetation and inhale the fumes, mitigate risk I say (ecks dee)

That said I’ve never forgotten my reasons for having to make “something from nothing” the way I learned from my grandfather. While I’m blessed to live in Canada where I don’t have to worry about legality, that’s still not the reality for a lot of people.

Many folk stoner engineer and craft out of necessity, not so much pleasure. Legality, cost, and the ability to conceal in plain sight a bong or it’s components; The benefit of dis-attachment knowing you can break, discard, or give it away since it can be remade in minutes from common stuff!

In the process of learning some of the finer points of cutting glass with bits, my YouTube algo started serving me some loosely-related DiY stoner engineering-type videos.

Not “how to make a bong” but videos like “how to make a hole in a bottle” and I don’t mean to sound flippant, but they’d always be a silly person on a gravel road with an ill-conceived idea like smashing a hole in a bottle with a spike. He figured out how to make a hole and not shatter the entire bottle by holding a rod on the interior but it’s basically cracked to rat shit and any sane person shakes their head. It’s not going to hold water, or it’s going to take so much epoxy… I don’t know how to finish this sentence because so many of these videos all insane lol

Now that I’m cutting holes and making bowls by cutting with glass bits, seeing the array of “kinda crazy” stoner engineering techniques… it made me feel like I should make a video showing a few of the things I’ve done over the years.

I didn’t want to pour too many hours into a video, that let’s face it, maybe a hundred or two hundred people will see over its entire lifetime! I doubt a video on this subject which features me talking about cannabis and using it on camera is going to go anywhere but into the infinite blackness. Still I was compelled to share what I think are some good ideas, specifically about making bowls. I think everybody knows about making a vessel with a tube, but not a lot is said about how to make a functional bowl cheaply, quickly, and needing a low skill-ceiling and no special tools.

Thanks for listening to my… too much thoughts lol. I hope you’ll enjoy the video I made and link here… and I hope you will take it for how I hope it will be taken, some super-simple ways to make bowls for those who have some of the challenges illegality brings.

I hope you’ll share what you think too, even if it is critical

This is the YouTube link… yeah… I literally haven’t familiarized myself with better video sharing sites yet and I really know I should. Get adblock and Firefox or your combination of sanity-restoring browsing tools aha

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NYBQY1aKrM