$20 DIY Water Bottle Cutting Stand - Guide by Julian Schuetze

     Hey all! Julian Schuetze here on behalf of The Collective. I wanted to share how setting up a cutting stand for bottles does not have to be complex, nor expensive. Here's one I made for ~$20:

Not the prettiest thing in the world. But it was very simple to make.

      The stand is a Christmas tree stand that I picked up for $15 from a hardware store. It's very cheap, badly moulded plastic, the screws are jank, and the reviews online were terrible because people's 8' trees were falling over. But I'm just shoving a 4' pole in there so it's not a big deal. It'll also fill up with water, but if you pick up a cheap one that still has stability issues...pour cement or something in there. I don't know. This idea come from a Mordhau Student - I'm honestly not sure why it took this long for someone to come up with that, but I'm glad they did.

     The pole is a 8' rounded pole, for fencing I think, and it was around $5 at the same hardware store.

     Really the hardest part was cutting the post down to size. I thankfully have a miter saw at my disposal, if you don't have one go bug that one friend who does or borrow a regular saw and hack away at it for a few minutes. I cut my 8' pole down to three segments: 4', 3', and 1'.

    The 4' to me feels pretty average height to put a bottle on. The 3' one is nice as a way to practice cutting lower targets. And I could add the 1' piece on top of the 4' piece if I wanted to simulate cutting a taller target. This gives me quite a bit of variety in my cutting height. If you wanted, you could buy a couple extra poles since they're so cheap and cut them all to size. So, you could have options from say, 2' to simulate a low leg strike, to 7' to simulate trying to hit Eric Hardeman in the head. 

     Another idea is to do 2 of these, so you can have them side by side at varying heights so I can practice cutting a longer plane, across two bottles simultaneously. Practice maintaining edge alignment for a longer period of time.

     I imagine turning this into a tatami stand would also not be difficult. If you have a hole saw for your power drill, you could cut out enough room for a peg. Make yourself some pegs by cutting up a dowel and sharpening them - either with a knife or a belt sander. Then call over your local tatami spiker to spike for you. For this though we are definitely talking to need a higher number of tools though, which is not as accessible for sure. But I know that we all know that one guy who has every power tool imaginable. So go bug them. Also tatami do be hella expensive now, so...

Whatever the case, I hope you found this helpful!