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All Forums >> [Bottle Forums] >> Cleaning and Repairing >> Cleaning bottles

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Cleaning bottles - 2/13/2004 4:08:14 AM    madcat   Posts: 1 Joined: 2/13/2004 Status: offline Hi! 11 years ago my husband and i bought a house that was built in 1880, we have 3/4ths of an acre and have to date found more than 100 bottles! part of our property sits on a flood plain and a creek runs thru it, when it floods and then the water receeds we find LOTS of bottles (we live in a town where most of the homes are before 1900 ) we have also found numerous bottles in and around the house as we restore and landscape it. I have been hesitant to clean most of the bottles aside from washing the mud off and out i havent been able to clean them like the ones i see in the antique shops around town and i havent cleaned any of the ones with labels aside from wipeing around the label with a damp cloth, are the labels important to collectors? lots of old medicine bottles with perscriptions on them and medicine still in them! moste have corks should i dump the medicine and poisions out? and how do i do this? I am so looking foward to hearing from anyone who can help me clean these bottles Post #: 1

RE: Cleaning bottles - 2/13/2004 9:34:01 AM    kawdog   Posts: 192 Joined: 10/22/2003 From: Ruston Louisiana Status: offline You might want to read through some of the previous posts on cleaning, there are a lot of good ideas and techniques. I think everyone has their favorite method. As for me, I dig many bottles from around 1900 and they have iron stains due to the iron around them that has rusted and fused together. I always do a good cleaning with soap and water first and use my bottle brushes I bought at wal-mart for a few bucks to reach the insides of the bottle. After that I usually have rust on them that will not come off. I bought a small plastic container in the tupperware section (probably 14" x 4") and filled it with the toilet bowl cleaner "The Works", it costs around 94 cents a bottle here. It contains mostly hydrochloric acid and you should wear gloves when fooling with it as it will hurt the skin and also should not be inhaled. I put my rusty bottles in the container, close the lid, and store it under the sink so any fumes that may leak out don't bother me. After it soaks over night I take the bottles out and clean them again with soap and water. Most people agree that original labels add value to bottles, so I would be careful in cleaning those and would use some other method. Those are just my thoughts on your questions, others have a lot better knowledge than me and there is a wealth of it on these forums. Good luck, kaw (in reply to madcat) Post #: 2

All Forums >> [Bottle Forums] >> Cleaning and Repairing >> Cleaning bottles

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