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Regal
Pale Bocks – A “Before and After” Story Randy Karasek and Jack Lucas A couple weeks after a very enjoyable 2004 canvention, I received a brief email from a good friend of mine, Jack Lucas, with the content of: “How close do you live to Silicon Valley? I have an offer for you.” Now we had just recently spent a fun couple of days in Dearborn catching up on numerous topics, including the all important merits of Michigan versus Michigan State sports, so I found the timing of the “offer” message intriguing. Also, for those of us who live in California, distance is not measured in terms of miles but in time, and I replied back with a somewhat long-winded answer of something like one to two hours depending on what city he was referring to and when/why necessary. A couple hours later I received another email from Jack that he had recently received a lead on what was described as a “beer can chest” in the San Jose, CA area; a wooden storage chest with the outside wrapped with uncut panels of Regal Pale Bock beer can sheets, USBC 121-10! Now with Jack living in Michigan and seller unwilling to ship due to the chest’s weight and size, we agreed that I would drive up to San Jose and check it out. When the seller brought out the
chest my initial reaction was what a piece of junk! Sure, those were real Regal Pale Bock panels around the top,
front, and left and right sides. But the chest was very dirty and grimy, and
looked like a number of very large rivets were used to secure the sheets to the
wooden interior, meaning there would be large holes in majority of the sheets.
Still, this is a very tough can, there did appear to be a number of full
sheets, and a quick “lick the thumb” test showed that the dirt and grime might
clean off reasonably well. A deal was reached, and off to home to see what
next! | |
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Turns out what appeared as large rivets were actually small tack nails through some type of “grommet”, and the holes in the sheets actually would be much smaller than initially thought. Good first sign. However, now how do I remove probably 100+ nails without scratching or further dinging any of the exterior metal? Well, after a couple of painful days using a wood chisel from inside of the chest to uncover the nails points, so the nails could be driven out from the inside and pulled with pliers, we now had four partial panels with roughly 18-20 full, uncut sheets. Some dishwashing soap, water, and mild scrubbing later, the panels cleaned up amazingly well, with the white and red colors very vivid, and the gold metallic absolutely shining!!! Turns out all that dirt and grime actually did a great job of protecting the beauty of the paint, with almost zero pitting in the over 50 year old metallic gold. Ok, now what? Jack has/had a number of early 1950’s flats
that we can use for correct vintage donor lids (that is a separate interesting
story), but who can we get to cut, roll and lid them? Weeks go by with some
emails and phone calls, we get Phil Pospychala to cut and roll them into
cylinders, and Fred Goerlach to apply the vintage donor lids. Roll the clock
forward another 5-6 weeks of shipping packages, holidays, and labor to roll/lid
the cans, and we now have 20 very nice, professionally rolled,
correct vintage lidded Regal Pale Bock beer cans!!! At least to Jack and I, a
very nice “Before and After” story!!! | |
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 After Picture Tote |
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