L42A1 Plastic bottle / lens cleaning brush

To think I got called a crook when I had a quantity of them priced at $75 each. Jeez, wish I had them all back!!

My advice to anyone who considers them selves nothing more than the custodian of their L42 & CES and who wants their pride & joy to go to the next generation in mint order is to wrap their lens brush bottle in plastic and keep it out of day light. Air and UV are its biggest enemy and will slowly break it down. If you look at a range of bottles and compare those that have survived a service life to those that have been wrapped in its ordnance packaging the old bottle is often yellow an discoloured. This is the effects of UV which slowly makes the plastic brittle. Remember these are the product of 1970's technology and don't have the inhibitor additives that modern plastics have.

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Originally Posted by chosenman

Unfortunately as with all things precious, when demand outstrips supply the price goes up! I've seen around 4 of these bottles sell on that auction site for around £500 - £700 which is where the price seems to have settled and nothing will drive that down unless a massive cache of originals flood the market.

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A more general search for the bottles using terms that a seller who doesn't know what they are might list them as rather than 'L42A1 Plastic lens brush bottle' saw one sold for £10 this April on Ebay UK,so not all of them fetch big money.
You just need to be lucky sometimes rather than have the biggest wallet :)

ATB Kevin

Still looking for one .

For $4 you can get a twin-bottle set, use your jeweller's saw to separate them and file away the bump, and have two.

https://www.libertytreecollectors.co...?idproduct=254

You can go this route, but you only get 1 as there is only 1 chain and 1 plastic loop to hold the chain on after cutting. The other problem is the diameter of the bottle is smaller than the original so it ends up looking about 3/4 scale. It is better than nothing and does not look too bad. I even made a label for mine by looking at an original pictures and messing about with type styles and sizes in WORD

A better option at filling the slot until the real thing can be found is to carve one out of a Swedish AK4 oiler. The center chamber is the exact dimensions as the L42 brush bottle. Cutting off the smaller chambers and shaping the chamber tab is easy, the real chore is grinding ouT the divider that is molded into the larger chamber. Once done, it is a perfeCT fit inside the chest.

They might as well have used shortened cigar tubes! No need to cut the brush handle down then. Or for extreme cleverness LOL, secure the cap of the cigar tube to the end of the brush handle at a point where it prevents the bristles pushing against the end of the tube and being deformed.

Excuse my digression. ;)