Lead cap question?

[2ndoldman]

Yesterday was another fine day here in Lotus Land. And I felt like a stroll in the muck was in order.

I spent most of the time clearing out an area that was littered with horrible signals.
From the bits and pieces of lead rope for making leaded glass windows.

To the little bits and pieces of old copper wire.

But I also kept my eyes open for anything out of place and this nice marble showed up.

And as always once the crap is cleared out some nicer signals start to appear. From the disappointing old coppers.

Adding to the disappointing old coppers is this broken spark plug. A Jupiter self cleaning patented 1914.

To the what the heck are these for new coppers.

Along the lines of "what the heck is this for. I found a strange Genie bottle like brass thingy. It has 3 holes for hanging and a threaded bottom. There is no apparent open connection from the bowl to the lipped portion and no hole from the bowl to the bottom threaded portion.

[2ndoldman]

Time now for the question. When did manufacturers stop using lead caps on bottles? I found another one yesterday, this one labeled from Hennessy.

  And it has a glass stopper fitted inside.

  This last find was the winner of the day and it won't mean much for most of you but if you hunt the Gorge area a bath house claim tag is a prime find.
I am sure that I would have eventually dug it but as I was already cleaning up on the horrible signals this one was an easy catch.

The thing is so thin the lettering is almost all see through.

Many members have commented on the padlock collection I have been adding to recently so I thought a picture of the collection so far was in order. The oldest dated one is the small cabinet lock at the bottom right it is dated 1886.

[JoshinMO]

Awesome but how can all that be found out there but no flint?  :laugh:
Got to be something ancient out there.

[2ndoldman]

There definitely will be something there Josh and I will find a point. But in this stretch of beach if it is not covered in muck it is encrusted with barnacles :sick: 
Also this area is rife with Native land claim and treaty disputes which makes one be very careful when you see this.
"Just a few decades ago, there was little consequence for encroaching onto an Indian midden. As any Canadian who has picked up forgotten
arrowheads as a child knows, there was a time nobody thought much about such pursuits. But today, even pocketing a single arrowhead, or
ancient salmon hook, has consequences.
The fine for picking up a piece of the past under the B.C. Heritage Conservation Act? Up to
$50,000 -- and two years in jail -- for an individual and $1 million for a corporation. Disturbing the past is not to be taken lightly."

[sneakygroundbuzzard]

you certianly do find some cool stuff
love that spark plug,probably because i spent the better part of 25 yrs as a mechanic
  i also love that lock collection,especially the siberian lock

[Jeffery Howle]

I have some old jar caps...I think mine are zinc...don't know about lead ones.....You really find some cool stuff....those old locks I would maybe have thrown back down...I need to keep more stuff....Just don't tell my wife :whistle:  :whistle:  :whistle:  :rolf:  :rolf:

[Jeffery Howle]

2ndoldman wrote: There definitely will be something there Josh and I will find a point. But in this stretch of beach if it is not covered in muck it is encrusted with barnacles :sick: 
Also this area is rife with Native land claim and treaty disputes which makes one be very careful when you see this.
"Just a few decades ago, there was little consequence for encroaching onto an Indian midden. As any Canadian who has picked up forgotten
arrowheads as a child knows, there was a time nobody thought much about such pursuits. But today, even pocketing a single arrowhead, or
ancient salmon hook, has consequences.
The fine for picking up a piece of the past under the B.C. Heritage Conservation Act? Up to
$50,000 -- and two years in jail -- for an individual and $1 million for a corporation. Disturbing the past is not to be taken lightly."

I think its a shame that they would rather something lay there and be lost in history forever than let someone pick it up and conserve it for all in the future :angry:  :angry:   

[painshill]

It’s not clear whether the Henessy cognac cap is threaded or not. Either way, it’s not going to be made of lead. It will either be zinc, tin or zinc/tin-plated steel. For a metal cap screw to provide an effective seal, it needs an internal gasket which these days is plastic. The gasket also prevents contact between the contents and the metal, which can spoil the flavour of things like fine spirits. Formerly the gasket was rubber or early plastic and before that usually cork... depending on the contents. I’ve not seen a glass one inside a cap, except where it’s a glass “plug” with a sheath of cork or rubber (push- fit), or where the bottle is threaded internally and the glass plug has a matching thread. In general, metal caps for externally threaded bottles began to replace cork closures in the 1930’s.
The disposable lead foil “capping” used on bottles was only ever a secondary seal not intended to come in contact with the product, rather than a leakproof closure. It’s more properly referred to as a “capsule” and its prime purpose is to protect an underlying cork closure from gnawing by rats and mice or infestation by cork weevil beetles. By the 1990’s it had been phased out and replaced with tin or aluminium laminated with plastic. The US banned it in 1996.
  My (wild) guess on the “Aladdin’s lamp” item is that it’s part of a candelabra (or tealight holder) and that several of them screwed into a multi-branched fitment. The holes might well then be to clip a Tiffany-style glass shade or something similar onto each light. I’m thinking a stylised candelabra version of something like this (without the handle or pedestal base):

Re holes in coins, I remember reading somewhere that there was period when suppliers of copper washers (used principally when nailing slates to battens for roofing) tried to hike the price from ¼ cent each to 2 cents each (using the high price of copper as an excuse). It apparently became common practice for roofers to punch a hole into cent coins to make their own.

[JoshinMO]

That punishment for someone picking up and keeping something nobody else wanted to cherish is awful. I sure feel fortunate to have permission to hunt on private property (non government owned!) to find ancient artifacts and to keep.
It's all about the $, not protecting.

[JoshinMO]

And if some folks want to build stores it's ok to remove and or destroy anything there, out here anyway.
Doesn't matter if a chief was laid in the ground to rest. :dunno: 
Guess I hijacked your topic. Sorry. :blush:  :laugh:

[2ndoldman]

Roger both you and Jeffery may be correct about the composition material in the caps.
In my experience the zinc that I have found is quite stiff and often brittle  whereas the caps that I find are quite soft, very pliable and easily scratched. I just now retrieved this one from my scrap bucket to test my theory. The scratch marks were easily done with my thumb nail.

All of the ones I have found so far do have cork gaskets.



  The stopper is a twist on top and this is what it looks like in place.

This was another one I found still in place on what remained of the bottle.

I have started keeping some of them in the hopes that if I do find an intact bottle I will then have the correct stopper to place on it.
And in this view you can see how the glass insert works.

  This one is unique and thankfully complete. It is a 2 part lead top. The inner piece is press fit and the outer is a twist cap.

Roger I have also heard of the practice of using pennies as a cost effective replacement for copper washers. A friend of mine actually still uses pennies as washer replacements when he needs one in a hurry. The ones I found the other day though were not drilled for use as washers as the holes are only 1/16th of an inch in diameter. :dunno:

[painshill]

Bruce
Lead and tin have similar hardness (1.5 and 1.5-1.8 respectively on the Mohs scale) and both can be easily scratched with a fingernail (typical hardness 2-2.5). Zinc has a hardness around 2.8 and wouldn’t usually be able to be scratched, but all three of those metals corrode to leave a thick oxide coating which is very soft. I’m pretty sure lead was never used for bottle caps in the industrial era because of its long association with toxicity.
As for washers, I can’t say whether that’s why those coins were holed, but I specifically mentioned roofing washers not sealing washers. Slate roofing pins are slender and blunt, to reduce the risk of splitting the battens as you drive them home and the soft copper washer served to reduce the risk of cracking the tile. It didn’t need to provide a seal since it sat underneath the next slate that overlapped on top. These days, it’s usual for renovations on old slate roofs to be done more efficiently with a one-piece roofing rivet like this:

The slates on my roof have lasted some 200 years but we had them all stripped off and re-pinned a few years ago because the pins eventually corrode. It’s difficult to re-pin a single slate if it slips and most people use thin copper strips with hooked ends to rectify that.