working on 49 today

[Dennis M.]

I had a 49 follow me home last week and pulled it into the shop today to try and get it started. Not much luck While mulling over my options I started to clean the toolbox and found the usual bolts, nuts, nails, etc, but also found three "Church Keys". Got me to wondering if the PO used them while operating the Cub! Does anyone remember when pop tops first were introduced? Had to stop working and ponder this for awhile.

[Soldner]

One of the first things my girlfriend and i did when we started restoring her grandpa's '48 was to go through the tool box, and i found many crazy things, including many nails, a hammer with a broken handle, and a bunch of bolts, and some other odds and ends. Now to your question of pop tops.. It was way before my time, but i called my grandpa, and he said sometime in the early sixity's. So i looked online, and i found Schlitz introduced the pop top in March of 1963.. So that pop top is probably double my age!!!

[Mike in Louisiana]

Dennis, I don't know how old you are so you might not remember, a qt of oil came in metal cans. Now that does not mean he did not use it for his beer or coke.

Mike

['Country' Elliott]

I'll take you boys back a few years when oil was sold in quart glass bottles with a metal spout . You could get them refilled at your neighborhood gas station. They even had metal carrying baskets (like the old millk bottle carriers)...that held 6 or 9 glass oil bottles .

Before Schlitz introduced the FIRST Pop-Top beer can...beer cans were opened with church keys. Most brewers sold their beer in steel, cone-shaped cans in the early 1950's with bottle caps on, so you could open it like a soda bottle !

Of course...Gas was 15 cents a gallon too !

[John *.?-!.* cub owner]

I don't know if I still have it, but I used to have a deal for opening the metal cans. It looked like an overgrown caulking gun with a funnel built into the end. You dropped a can in it and squeezed the handle. It pushed the can down onto the opener and at the same time punctured a vent in the back end. Worked great for metal cans, but not worth a hoot for the paper ones.

Also remember several years ago one of the oil companies using the pitch "Real men don't use plastic oil cans". Guess there must not be any "Real Men" left.

[Bigdog]

Would you believe that I have a couple of steel cans of oil still setting around the shop?

[Maritimer]

I'm a little younger than you fellows, but I too have a few metal quart cans full of oil. 30w I think. They're Texaco cans

[Arizona Mike]

One of my after school jobs in high school was working at Star Phillips 66. First thing on the agenda every afternoon was to fill all the empty glass oil jars so everything out by the pumps was full. They looked . It was fun filling them with the hand pump