Side Seam and Lip Seam on This Bottle Don't Line Up. How Old?

FreeBirdTim

Silver Member
Sep 24, 2013
3,757
6,731
Scituate, RI
🥇 Banner finds
1
Detector(s) used
Garrett AT Pro
Primary Interest:
All Treasure Hunting
Bought this bottle at a yard sale the other day and I'm trying to date it. Not really old, but it is kind of strange. It's a 1/2 gallon bottle with a smooth base. It has a mold seam that goes up to the lip. The lip has a seam, but it doesn't line up with the side seam. Also looks like some tooling marks around the lip, but not positive. Any guesses on the age of this bottle and what is was used for?

DSC08748.JPG DSC08750.JPG DSC08751.JPG
 

sandchip

Silver Member
Oct 29, 2010
4,351
6,871
Georgia
Detector(s) used
Teknetics T2SE
Primary Interest:
All Treasure Hunting
I'd say early machine made, post 1903. ABM bottles are made in two steps. The body of the bottle is initially blown into a smaller, tapered mold in order to uniformly shape the gather of hot glass, then removed, being held by the part of the mold that forms the lip and inserted into the full size mold. Sometimes on early examples, some incidental rotation occurred, resulting in the misalignment of the mold lines shown in your example. Hope this helps.
 

NJKLAGT

Bronze Member
Oct 18, 2014
1,118
1,913
Southern Ontario
Detector(s) used
Garrett Euro Ace 350
Primary Interest:
All Treasure Hunting
Looks to me like a modern piece, probably made in the last 25 years. Maybe used as a vase, or some kind of decor.
 

OP
OP
FreeBirdTim

FreeBirdTim

Silver Member
Sep 24, 2013
3,757
6,731
Scituate, RI
🥇 Banner finds
1
Detector(s) used
Garrett AT Pro
Primary Interest:
All Treasure Hunting
Can you post a link to the store that carries this bottle? It could be new, but it was in with a tote full of 1940's mason jars. Seems odd that it would be mixed in with them, but anything is possible at yard sales.
 

NJKLAGT

Bronze Member
Oct 18, 2014
1,118
1,913
Southern Ontario
Detector(s) used
Garrett Euro Ace 350
Primary Interest:
All Treasure Hunting
Can you post a link to the store that carries this bottle? It could be new, but it was in with a tote full of 1940's mason jars. Seems odd that it would be mixed in with them, but anything is possible at yard sales.

It'd be very difficult to find this exact bottle online, since there's very little to narrow down the search. If there was some embossing on it of any kind, that might help, but -

It's not unusual that you found it mixed in with those older mason jars. It's a yard sale, so they probably figured, "well I'll just make a jars/bottle box", and didn't discriminate between different ages, etc.

If it was old, the closest thing that this would resemble would be an English bottle made on an Ashley-type machine. These bottles often have offset seams like yours (from the finish being moulded separately), some waviness to the glass (yet more pronounced), and judging from the examples I've dug/seen, remarkably clean glass. I've dug them out of pure black ash and still there was no haze or anything on the glass surface (if anyone would like to chime in and tell me how in the world they did that, I'd love to know).

Your bottle appears to lack any bubbles in the glass (that's another can of worms though, because there are plenty of centuries-old bottles without bubbles) and doesn't seem to have any base wear at all, which would be telling of years of use (another can of worms). MOST IMPORTANTLY, is that it doesn't have 'that look'. I'm no expert, but I do know that when I first started collecting, I could almost instantly spot this kind of stuff from a mile away. For me, most of all, it's the colour. These modern pieces always have this weird green-grey look to them.

Here are some older English machine-made bottles. They are so darn clean you'd think I bought them from Ikea last week, and yet they are all dug, and around a century old:

DSCF9805.jpg
 

Top Member Reactions

Users who are viewing this thread

Top