Cleaning old glass bottles?

[cgarr]

Started digging at my old farm which was owned by a local pharmacist who used to use areas for dumping the old glassware, (med bottles, perfume, etc. I got buckets of old bottles and would like to try and get the staining off them, they were in the ground since the late 1800 up to 1905. Also have some plates which say Knowles, Taylor, and Knowles on them which could use some clean up too. Any advice so I can display them? some are pretty cool..

[RoninLB]

maybe try a gal of HCL from hardware store.

[fintstone]

This is a widespread hobby and a search will bring countless links. here are a couple:

http://www.antiquebottles.com/cleaning.html
http://www.antiquebottles-glass.com/cleaning.html

[Zeke]

I'd just soak them first in something a little less toxic. A couple of days in some Simple Green (I really don't know the toxicity of this stuff, some say it's nasty) and some vinegar is a start.

[WolfeMacleod]

Hey, any Coriciden bottles in that bunch?

If so, I may be interested in buying a few...

[cgarr]

Originally Posted by WolfeMacleod

Hey, any Coriciden bottles in that bunch?

If so, I may be interested in buying a few...

Don't know about that but I have a nice:

Dr. Kilmer's Swamp-Root Kidney Liver & Bladder Cure bottle..

Here are a few I got washed up, they are really bad, I don't know what the big tan one was used for, but then I don't know what any of them were used for? A lot of them don't have any markings on them at all.

[slodave]

Originally Posted by WolfeMacleod

Hey, any Coriciden bottles in that bunch?

If so, I may be interested in buying a few...

Looking for some guitar slides?

[cgarr]

Here is something else I found, it looks like some type of mixer blade, its iron or steel but as you can see after 100 years in the wet ground this is how it came out, virtually no rust, looks to have a galvanizing coating on it, maybe why Porsche went with the process too?

[competentone]

Try the "Bar Keeper's Friend"

http://www.barkeepersfriend.com/products.htm

I get it at Lowes, but have seen it at Walmart, and a number of grocery stores.

[competentone]

Originally Posted by cgarr

Started digging at my old farm which was owned by a local pharmacist who used to use areas for dumping the old glassware, (med bottles, perfume, etc...

Hopefully you're not sitting on a super-fund toxic waste clean-up site!

[Joeaksa]

My sisters husband owned a drug store in a small town on the Mexican border for 30 years. It had been there for over 100 years.

They finally started looking in the basement after renovating the place and found old bottles and such like you are finding. Also loads of old mortar and pestals and so on, the stuff they used back in the 1800's.

[vash]

hmmm. short of being packed full of sand/dirt, i dont think i would do alot of cleaning. i worked on a seismic retrofit job in san francisco. the early part of the project included digging down and enlarging the footings. i found some stuff leftover from the 1906 earthquake. as a matter of fact, we had a full time arch students with old school maps. they could tell us this was the "so and so" property. it was cool. i found bottles, old pipes, etc. the "holy grail" for me was antique marbles. i found 8 or so. we ran across 4 priveys (polite way to say outhouse). back in the day, folks would toss all sorts of stuff down there. they were taped off, and it was illegal for us to pull stuff out.

[Don Plumley]

Like Vash said, antique bottles are a big deal to some folks. I worked with a guy that dug everywhere all over the Bay Area armed with turn of the century maps, probes, etc. Privies were his favorite targets. Some bottles were worth seriously $30-40K. So I wouldn't start washing them until you know what you might have as some of that old patina might come off...

[WolfeMacleod]

Originally Posted by slodave

Looking for some guitar slides?

You got it!