When I watched this video on making a DIY paracord dispenser I immediately went out to the workshop and tried my hand at it. Unfortunately, I had a bit of trouble transferring the idea to a pill bottle on my first attempt because I tried to put the bolt through the sides of the bottle which made it very difficult to attach the paracord to.
So, I tried a minor modification of my own and wound up with something that works just as good, if not better. Here’s what I did…
Find an old pill bottle you don’t want and a threaded bolt that’s a bit longer than the bottle is tall. I’d say this bolt is about 1/2″ longer than the bottle is tall:
Drills holes through the bottom of the bottle and lid big enough for the bolt to pass through (you can see I’d already done that in the photo above) as well as in the side of the bottle for the paracord and then insert the bolt and paracord as such:
Attach a roughly two-inch piece of electrical tape to the end of the paracord as shown:
Now take the flat end of the tape and wrap it around the bolt. Be sure to wrap the tape low enough so that it doesn’t interfere with the threads that stick out of the lid. Also, and this is important, wrap the tape so that the paracord will want to wrap around the bolt in a counterclockwise fashion (I’ll explain later):
You should have something like this:
Now, thread a lock nut onto the end of the bolt but leave a little wiggle room for the bolt to turn freely (note: you could probably use two nuts tightened onto themselves if you don’t have a locking nut):
I didn’t have a wingnut large enough for the bolt I used so I used the end of a drywall anchor–which is similar enough to a wingnut–and allowed me to have something to grasp onto when I need to reel the paracord back in:
Because it takes too long by hand use a drill to reel in the paracord (remember to reel it counterclockwise to make your life easier later):
So that the paracord doesn’t accidentally suck into the pill bottle, tie a knot in the end:
That’s it. You’re done. I think I got about 20-25 feet of paracord into this small bottle.
I should caution you that it’s possible to reel in too much cord thereby making it very difficult to pull out later. 🙂
Because the cord is taped to the bolt you can always pull it completely out and use the entire length but, obviously, you’ll need to put it back when done which means you’ll need to be able to unscrew the wingnut and bolt so you’ll need tools for that. And, just in case you were thinking about it, don’t glue any of this stuff together or you’ll never get it undone. Yes, it DID cross my mind briefly.
Last, though you can reel the paracord in with a clockwise motion, doing so makes it difficult to then reel in by hand later because the wingnut will want to unscrew off of the bolt. I learned that the hard way.
Anyway, it works out well and got tossed into my camping gear… perhaps I’ll make a bigger one for later.
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