green bottle

Red there is numbers on the bottoms. Each bottle has different damage in the same area,its not the same damage on any one bottle. it almost looks like the bottles were layed on some sort of cloth to cool,my camera isnt good enough to pick up on the minor damages.

Ok beendiggin, your first. The snap case has been made in many styles for many styles of bottles. For a round body bottle they usually had a flat bottom disc on a wooden broomstick type of handle. Above that there were two half round metal flat C- shaped cupping holders that were released to clamp around the sides of the bottle to hold it for the finish tooling. There were some made for holding square bottles and after the finish completion of all of them the bottle handling boy responsible for taking them to the annealing furnace or lehr - would simply lift the bottle out of the snap case and take it there.

I have seen where they were used on Case Gins, and about three years ago I found one that was used to hold the SARATOGA Mineral Water Bottles when they stopped empontilling them. It had a cup like set-up that would be placed on the bottom of the formed bottle but the half round clamping devises were closed on the shoulders of the SARATOGA bottles. I only know of one of these being in captivity, but it is a neat one. A material was on that one but they wouldn't take it out of the showcase for me to get close examination. There was some type of material on the clamping pads - but I couldn't tell what it was. In the glass industry that I worked in there was a lot of asbestos material woven and used for contact with hot glass. Some of this was transite - and that was used for take-out jaw inserts, tong covers, and on a lot of hand tools for handling the glass. It was also used on the bottle sweep out arms for pushing the completed bottles from the dead plate to the hot end conveyor belt and on the spacing push in arms that moved a spaced row of bottles on the belt in a lehr. Some dead plates were even made for the ABM machines but the material life was low because of the wear of pushing the bottles off the dead plate.

I will look for some snap case illustrations tomorrow. I hope to get back to the museum that has the SARATOGA Snap Case - this summer. RED Matthews

Now for your post myersdiggers1998, I did see the letters embossed on the bottom you pictured but I couldn't read them.

I am sure the hot bottles were not laid on a cloth in the making process. As I explained in my blog on the Half-Leaf Mold Cavity Welded Repair. The requirement for fixing nicks in the side wall or inside of many damaged repair welds, the nick was machined or ground out an then the welder would stretch our a stick of the mold metal on a welding plate or carbon block while he stretched the stick out to a smaller diameter for welding into the iron. These sticks were molded by the foundries for the mold shops to use for cavity repair in the damaged mold cavity. The mold iron graphite in the sticks would be changed to small dots of carbon by the melting and stretching. When the weld was done a mold maker would file or riffle the cavity to take it back to the radius or shape of the cavity. When hot glass touched the welded surface it would erode these little round dots of carbon out of the surface iron and give the repaired area the look of cloth on the glass surface made in the mold.
If I could get one of your bottles to examine - I am sure I could confirm this action is what happened. Thanks for showing them to us. RED Matthews

Reds description was definitely vivid enough but here's some visual. The picture was from the thread about the Clevenger auction by KentOhio. Sorry it's so small.

http://www.sha.org/bottle/bases.htm#Snap%20Case%20&%20Sabot

Thanks for the explanations and the pics. The knowledgable people on this forum are amazing .

Thanks Red and beendiggin for all your help.I am very fond of the digging and finding part of the hobby,but tend to shy away from the research part.I never seem to be able to find the answers i'm looking for,until i came here...[]

after looking at the bottle closer ,ive realised that if you turn it upside down your thumb fits into the top damage and the bottom damage is a persons thumb nail where it was held by the maker...

Well myersdiggers1998, I can assure you that no one touched those bottles with their bare hands. The molten glass ready for forming has to be close to 2300degrees in the crucible or even in the forehearth today. This temperature is required to melt and homogenize all of the batch materials. The secret of making any product is to accomplish each stage of forming in making the item - cooled with CONTROLLED HEAT LOSS, so the next stage of forming, cutting or applying other glass, can take place as the temperature is reduced. This includes the handling and transfer to the annealing furnace. I can tell you that no one took the bottles in their hand at 400 to 600 degrees.
At the glass machine when a bottle is set out on the finished conveyor, the bottlemakers will pick one up to light their cigarette in the neck. Then they set them on the floor and let them cool without annealing. As the cool they will often explode before you can touch them. They explode because of the cords of stress are in the glass causing the explosion breakage. If this happens to quickly they have to alter the forehearth delivery temperature of the metal being delivered to the glass machine. RED Matthews

I dont know how people get used to working around molten glass. The heat is just crazy if you get even close.

tons of glass blowing videos on u tube...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1xb48Y6EdA

"feels like my face is melting off..."

Red your inbox is full.