Antique bottle capper question

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GRHunter

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I have never used a bench bottle capper, antique or otherwise. But I found this thing in my garage and I remember my dad telling me that his grand dad used it to bottle his beer. Will this thing work on modern bottles and caps? Also, the piston range is only about 1 1/4 inches. Does that mean that all my bottles will need to be within 1 1/4 inches of each other? I know it's adjustable, but I don't want to be re-adjusting it for every bottle.

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wow very cool. i would suggest trying it on an empty bottle or two. i would assume it would work just fine. as far as your adjustment issue. sort your bottles before capping. arrange them by height. that way you only need to adjust the capper a few times during a session.
 
Try it on an empty bottle and see! Worst case scenario is you waste a bottlecap...possibly a bottle if things go really wrong.
 
Take a look inside the bell of the capper and see if there is any kind of rubber gasket there. I picked up a nice antique one from ebay for about $10. It's in nearly new shape, but I was having an issue with capping. It put the caps on just fine, but I could barely get the bottle back out of the capper without breaking it. I picked up some garden hose gaskets, stacked two of them inside the bell and tacked them in place with a couple of tiny drops of CrazyGlue, and away I went. Mine is more easily adjustable - I just turn the handle more and the capper will travel the length of the arm.
 
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