# Cleaning Hutchinson stoppers



## blobbottlebob (Dec 29, 2008)

For years, I have enjoyed collecting hutches. Sometimes, you find them minty, sometimes, they have a chip, and sometimes, you find half of one. I always keep the stoppers on these thinking that I may - down the road - put them in another bottle. One day, I was going to watch a DVD and I thought to myself, "Self. You're sitting here anyway. Why don't you polish something." And I that's exactly what I did.

 I grabbed a black old stopper in found condition, and began to work on it with metal polish. After the movie was over, I had several blackened paper towels and a sparkling looking shiny silver stopper! 

 For the purists out there, I realilze that I modified the piece a bit, but I'm guessing that this is what it originally looked like. The shiny silver stopper must have made a great little accent atop the original bottle!

 Many original Hutchinson brand stoppers were made with a solid brass core, and then some kind of silver-tin alloy plating it. The chrome or silver can look really nice. If you are considering trying this, the polish I used was called Noxon. It takes a fair amount of elbow grease as well. Additionally, many stoppers have corroded over the years. If you can see the metal has badly deteriorated, it will not polish up very well. But, if the metal looks solid, you can achieve some nice results. Here's an example.


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## div2roty (Dec 29, 2008)

Do you put them back into the bottles afterwards?


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## blobbottlebob (Dec 31, 2008)

Hey Div2roty,
 I do sometimes put them on my display bottles, but I suppose without the rubber gaskets, they are easily removed again. So far, I haven't really taken them out of whole bottles, but rather, just polished up loose ones from broken finds. I think that these are hard to remove from a whole bottle if the rubber is in good shape. In fact, I think the Hutchinson company originally sold a tool that would help remove the rubber. (They called it a stopper puller). Then they would sell replacement gaskets.


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## blobbottlebob (Jan 12, 2009)

Here is my pile of polished Hutchinson stoppers. It weighs about 1 & 1/4 pounds (so far) and fills up a 16 ounce cup.  Some of these came out sparkling, others look a little rough. I am going to start a thread (tomorrow) about what I learned from doing this. You might be surprised.


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## RED Matthews (Jan 12, 2009)

Hi Bob;  I think your idea sounds great.  I have a few Hutchison stopper bottles, but know very little about them except what I have read.  Thanks, RED Matthews


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## blobbottlebob (Jan 12, 2009)

Thanks Red!
 There is one more thing I want to mention in this thread about the rubber part of the stopper. If it is still a little flexible, it can be pulled off of a stopper by first stretching it out away from the center and then pulling it up and off towards the top of the bottle. That is, the little retaining ridge on the stopper is more narrow towards the top of the bottle than it is facing the contents. This makes sense because the operational pressure on the stopper is downward on the metal in the closed position. (This doesn't always work. Sometimes the rubber has dry rotted or it is too stuck to the metal.)


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