Covid19 has pretty much left me trapped in the house over the last few months. Needing to keep busy I started to clean out the basement, selling some stuff on Ebay while tossing the rest out in the trash. I did come across this Everedy Gear Top Bottle Capper under a table gathering dust and rust and decided it would be a good restoration project. Restoration would be very easy as there are only a few parts and the capper was simple to take apart.
Tools you can use
Since the bottle capper is made of cast iron and had some serious rust, I decided to go with a wire brush to remove the dirt and prep the surface for paint.
Wire wheel brush set – About $9 at amazon
I started using this Rust-Oleum Universal spray paint and it really does a great job. Its a bit more expensive at about $10 a can, However I believe the finish is much better. Amazon has a ton of colors, I used Crimson Red for my project
History of the Everedy Gear Top Bottle Capper
This is a pretty self explanatory device. Place a bottle in the bottom, a cap in the top – crank the lever and wham-o a capped bottle. However, in the 1920’s this was a new concept. So new in fact it was patented on July 4th, 1922. (strikes me as odd that the patent office would be issuing patents on a Holiday)
As the story is told this particular unit was owned by my Great Grandmother and used in a grocery store in New York City in the late 1920’s. I heard rumors she was bottling her own “bathtub” Gin and selling it out the back of her shop. The store eventually closed and for some reason this was kept and stored in my Grandmothers attic for another 50 years where I found it, and stored it in my own house for 15 more years where I finally decided to clean it up
BTW – If you are interested in reading the patent – CLICK HERE FOR A PDF
Getting started
****SIDE NOTE**** I have not tested the paint on the unit, but I am going to assume that its lead based. Use a respirator or at a minimum N95 mask to do this job.
Everedy Gear Top Bottle Capper is easy to take apart the first step is to slide the gear lever and handle out of the housing. Once its removed you can slide the capper down out of the housing as well.
I took the bottle capper out in the back yard and went to town on it with the wire brush. I was able to get 90% of the rust and grime off of it. For the smaller areas I switched to my Dremel tool Which by the way is one of my favorite tools.
Paint & Prime
All parts were painted with a coat of primer and allowed to dry for a few hours.
I then proceed to paint the lever the caper and gears black, while spraying the body of the unit red. I think the red I picked was pretty close to the original.
My Everedy Gear Top Bottle Capper is missing its wooden handle. Maybe at some point I will make one or find one somewhere. The fiction pad in the base was really rotted so I replaced it with a couple bar coasters.
One thing I noticed that a probably should not have done was paint the gear drive. The tolerances are very tight and some of the paint was stripped off while testing the capper. Hindsight 20/20 a bath in evapo-rust would have probably made better sense.
This was a quick and easy project I was able to complete in an afternoon. The Bottle Capper is a great addition to my collection!
I hope this blog inspires you to restore some old trinkets you have laying around the house.
Thank you for reading my blog,
Joe
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