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This is a typical mouth-blown shop crew which included the "mold tender" boy lower right with a set of "tongs" in his right hand, the "gatherer" behind gaffer with the next gob of glass for the gaffer on a second blowpipe, and the "snapper up" to the right standing with a snap-case tool in his left hand.

Click on the picture to the right to see an enlarged version of a typical glass-tipped pontil scar that shows the detail better.

before the early 19th century, and continued to be common on a large majority of bottles up until the American Civil War.

There is a lot of overlap, however, particularly during the later 1850s and early 1860s.

Many different designs of these tools were used though the tool illustrated here would be typical of the general snap-case design.

The terms hinge mold base or snap case base are used by many to denote this configuration of the true-two piece mold although in the case of the spice bottle illustrated to the left, a pontil rod was used to hold the bottle for finishing, not a snap case tool.

It is at least as common on American made bottles as the glass tipped pontil mark Boow 1991.

The cup-bottom mold was also at least a three-part mold where the third piece was a base plate which had an shallow depression that "cupped" and molded the entire base and the lower heel of the bottle, though on earlier items 1870s and earlier it appears that the base plate was simply a flat piece of metal or even the floor of the glass works on which the two upper halves of the mold sat Kendrick 1968; empirical observations.

The full-height two-piece mold was in use for making bottles in the U.

Example of a Blenko piece being ground and polished.

- Machine-made bottles have a side mold seam which runs through the finish lip to the extreme upper edge - and usually over the edge - of the finish rim.