A Basic Guide To Glass on Glass Joint Sizes

One important detail that many stoners forget when picking out their bongs, and attachment for their bongs, is the joint size on the bong/attachments. You can’t just go online and buy whatever bongs and accessories look cool and hope it all works out! (Well I mean you could, but why not get it right the first time?)

Male Or Female

This should be fairly straightforward, joints only attach with things like bowls, ashcatchers, nails, etc., if they have opposite joint ends as they do. So a male will only connect with a female, and vice versa.

Joint Sizes

The Joint Size refers to the diameter of the hole that your downstem or bowl will fit into, normally these joint sizes don’t make much of a difference by themselves. You will, however, generally find that pieces with smaller joints, like the 10mm, will generally have smaller bowl sizes, and the downstems may clog faster, and the opposite to be true for larger joints like 18.8mm.

Now, there are three main sizes of joints when dealing with water pipes such as bongs and oil rigs: 10mm, 14.4mm, and 18.8mm. Occasionally you’ll hear people say things like “I have a 9mm joint” when really they mean 10, or a 14mm, when they technically mean a 14.4, and so on. Don’t be worried if someone says they have a 14mm joint and you’re bringing over a 14.4mm bowl, it’s more likely than not the same size..

When buying accessories for your bong, such as extra bowls, nails, or ashcatchers, know the size you’re looking for. You can’t squeeze a 18.8mm male nail into a 14.4mm female joint, and 10mm male bowls will not get a tight seal on a 18.8mm female joint. If you try any of these things anyways, you will not have a good time.

Even if you buy the wrong accessories or bowl pieces, or simply want to use your accessories on all of your pieces, you can always buy adapters. Since you can’t change the joint’s sex or size of your bong, you can fortunately buy adapters that will attach to your bong’s regular joint and allow for the use of a different sex or size of various other bowls, nails, and ashcatchers.

These adapters come in in pretty much every combination of joint size and sex converters that you can imagine. Got a 10mm male-jointed oil rig you want to be able to smoke herb out of? Buy yourself a male-to-female adapter and toke away. Buy a bowl that was too small? Grab yourself a 14.4m female to 10mm female connector, and get the tight seal your hits deserve!