Hip flask

Jewelry Discussion
1

Here is an interesting question: does anyone know how to make a hip
flask lid?

Richard Whitehouse

2 
Here is an interesting question: does anyone know how to make a hip
flask lid?

Hi Richard;

Here’s a suggestion, one that I’ve used on occasion. Find a plastic
bottle with a cap to match the size you’d like to use, such as a
shampoo bottle, etc. Cut the threaded part off the bottle, and sprue
up that part and the cap too and cast them. Then you can fabricate
the bottle and solder on the threaded top and the cap should fit.
You’ll probably need to find a sheet of neoprene or rubber to make a
disk to fit up in the cap as a seal. The next option would involve
taps and dies. You’d need a pipe tap, quite a large one with coarse
threads, and a bottoming tap, and the matching die. You’d need to
have some pretty thick walled tubing of the right diameters to do
this. Now another suggestion, which is closer to the way this thing
would have been historically accomplished, would involve using
threaded hardwood dowels and thin walled tubing, which you would have
to fabricate, and having annealed it, you would basically chase it in
onto the threads of the wood dowels. Not as hard as it sounds, a
pair of pliers with both jaws being round and tapered works for that
sort of thing. The difficult part would be choosing thread patterns
on the dowels that would allow the subsequently finished metal parts
to thread together properly. And here’s yet a third technique that
comes to mind. Fabricate two short tubes which would telescope, one
inside the other, but with difference in diameter of say, two
millimeters. Now get a dowel the size of the smaller tube, and take
a length of one millimeter square wire and double it, tacking it
together at the ends only. Anneal it, and wrap it along the dowel
in a tight spiral. Cut off the soldered ends and unscrew this double
wire into two spirals. Sweat solder one on the outside of the
smaller metal tube, the other inside the larger tube. I hope you can
visualize this, and by the way, I’ve not tried this, so maybe you’d
want to take a shot at it working in brass or copper and let me know
how it works out :slight_smile:

David L. Huffman

3

David,

Your suggested technique for making large diameter threads using two
wire helixes works well. You do have to be very careful about the
handedness of the thread …don’t ask about that particular learning
experience.

Jeff
Demand Designs
Analog/Digital Modelling & Goldsmithing
http://www.aztec-net.com/~jdemand

4 
 You do have to be very careful about the handedness of the thread
...don't ask about that particular learning experience.

Well, dang, Jeff, now we have to ask about that particuler
learning experience! Nothing beats a good anecdote.

–Noel

5

Hey guys, the hip flask I am working on has a bayonet fixing for the
lid

Richard