Isn’t this beautiful?
Made of silver-plated brass, what we have here is an icon of classic, 1920s design, made by one of the most famous companies in the world.
I picked this up at my local flea-market. I’ve always wanted a lighter like this. It’s solid, chunky, dependable, stylish, and it looks so much more interesting than the bog-standard Zippo-lighter, which most people are doubtless familiar with, from movies and TV shows. In this posting, I’ll be going through the process of how I restored the lighter, and also a bit about its history in general.
What Is a Lift-Arm Lighter?
This style of lighter is of a kind hardly seen in the 21st century. There’s only a handful of companies that still make them (if that), and prior to their limited resurgence in recent years, haven’t been widely manufactured since the 1950s.
Generally featuring a horizontal flint-tube and striking-wheel, a spring-loaded snuffer-arm, and a refueling hole underneath, usually accessed via a screw-on cap, lift-arm lighters were among the most common types of cigarette lighters available from the end of the First World War, up until the end of the 1950s. In the long and storied history of the lighter, that’s only about 40 years of existence. Not much, when you think of something like the ZIPPO which has been around now, for nearly 90 years!
The name of this style of lighter comes from the very distinctive spring-loaded snuffer-arm which is mounted on the top of the body, parallel to the horizontal flint-tube and striking-wheel. To operate the lighter, you flip the arm upwards and then strike the wheel to create the necessary sparks to light the fuel. When you’re done, you flip the snuffer-arm the other way, and it snaps down to extinguish the flame and protect the wick. Since you had to flip or ‘lift’ the snuffer-arm each time you wanted to use the lighter, they became known as ‘lift-arm’ lighters.
How Old Are Lighters Such as These?
A traditional, liquid-fuel lighter of this kind typically dates from the late 1910s/early 1920s, up to the late 1930s/early 40s. They appear to have died off during the war. This style made a BRIEF resurgence in the 1950s, but then appears to have died off again by the end of the 1960s.
That being the case, the majority of lift-arm lighters of this style date from the 20s and 30s, when they were in their heyday. Prominent manufacturers include POLO, PARKER, and DUNHILL, along with a variety of European and American manufacturers. If you’re looking to buy an original lift-arm, then in most cases, you’ll be hunting down a lighter that is the better part of 80 – 100 years old.
Lighters like these date back to the days when smoking was not only common, but highly fashionable. The dangers of smoking were unknown (or at least unacknowledged), and tobacconalia was extremely popular. For most men and a lot of women, owning a flashy lighter was as common an accessory in 1930, as owning a smartphone is today. Lighters were made of solid gold and silver, and in some truly beautiful and fascinating designs and styles.
It’s a thrill to own a lighter from this fascinating and bygone era, full of such elegance, even for something as questionable as smoking. While I don’t smoke, I have always felt that smokers from the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s had some of the most interesting and beautiful smoking accessories ever made.
What is YOUR Particular Lighter?
The model that’s being featured in this posting is the DUNHILL Model A ‘Sports’ lighter, manufactured in the second half of the 1920s (ca. 1924-1928, according to my research). As far as lift-arm models go, it’s one of the most famous designs ever produced.
The lighter has certain features which were iconic to the Dunhill brand, such as the distinctive, downward-curving lift-arm, with “Dunhill” on it, and the three-slot windshield (what ZIPPO would later call a ‘chimney’, in the early 1930s).
The lighter is made of brass, and is plated in silver. Here and there, the silver plating has started to wear off, most likely from use, cleaning, and just the friction from being shoved into, and being pulled out of, pockets for 95 years!
One of the more interesting features of the lighter is the windshield or chimney which surrounds the wick. Although it has a number of horizontal vents cut into it, the purpose of the windshield is, nonetheless – to guard the flame and wick against the wind. The vents in the sides of the windshield allow for airflow and sufficient oxygen for the flame, while the body of the shield reduces the likelihood of the surrounding wind to snuff out the flame accidentally.
Whatever you call them – wind guards, windshields or chimneys, this feature was very rare on early lighters. Most lighters from the 1890s through to the 1930s had no wind-protection of any kind (or at least, had very, very little), making them nigh impossible to use outside on anything but the calmest of days. One of the selling points of the ZIPPO when it came out in 1932, was that it was the ZIPPO WINDPROOF LIGHTER!
While no lighter can be said to be fully windproof, the chimney or windshield did at least give the flame a fighting chance, allowing the lighter to be used more easily outdoors.
That said – even into the 1930s, such features were rare (and still are rare) on the majority of cigarette lighters – especially those of the lift-arm variety, so the presence of the shield makes this one stand out quite significantly.
Restoring the Lighter
This lighter, while functional, was in a very sorry state of affairs when I bought it. The whole body and mechanism were black and grey with heavy tarnish and the mechanism itself was clogged with dust, grime, ash and soot.
Removing the Windshield
The first order of business was to clean the lighter and remove all the grime and tarnish. Part of this process was removing the windshield or chimney from around the wick and flint-wheel. Easy in theory, but difficult in practice!
The windshield, chimney or wick-guard (whatever you want to call it) was held onto the top of the lighter’s body by two absolutely microscopic screws. The first step was to clean out all the gunk inside the windshield, and then locate the screws. Using a very small, very thin flathead screwdriver, I unscrewed the two screws and very carefully lifted the shield off of the lighter. I tipped the two screws into a glass cup nearby to stop them from rolling away, and then started cleaning the shield, polishing it, removing dust and grime, picking out old bits of wick, cleaning the wick-housing and everything else that I could reach while the windshield had been removed.
Once the shield was clean and the area where it was mounted onto the lighter was clean, I had to reassemble the whole thing. To do this, I mounted the shield back on top of the lighter and then I had to get the two screws down through the shield and onto their holes, and then screw them back in.
How?
The screws are TINY (about half a grain of rice), and there’s no way to grip them while screwing them in. In the end, I used Blu-Tak (what some people might call adhesive Plasticine) to stick the screws onto my screwdriver. Then I lowered them one at a time, through the gap in the windshield and into their respective holes. Then I very carefully screwed them back in.
Don’t be fooled into thinking this was easy – it took about 3-4 tries for each screw, before I got the threads to line up properly, but once they do, the actual act of screwing them down was thankfully – very easy.
Replacing the Wick, Flints and Wadding
Next came the relatively easy task of replacing the wadding, the wick and the flint inside the lighter. This was done by unscrewing the fuel-cap underneath the lighter, and removing all the cotton-ball wadding using a pair of tweezers. After teasing out little tufts of cotton wool, it was a matter of grasping them in the fingers and then spinning them around and pulling at the same time. This caused the wadding fibres to mesh together. This means you can pull them out more easily, and you can pull out more wadding each time, instead of little tufts.
Once the wadding was out, the wick came next. At some point in this lighter’s history, some ingenious fellow had come up with the idea of wrapping very thin steel wire around the base of the wick, and leaving several inches of this wire to trail off the end. This is a great idea! It means that you can feed the wire through the body of the lighter…and out the other side.
That means that you can grab the wire, and yank it through the lighter, and that pulls the wick inside along with it. No more screwing around with trying to stuff the wick inside, just pull it in. Any old copper or steel wire (of an appropriate thinness) will do. Just make sure you wrap it around the wick a sufficient number of times so that it doesn’t unexpectedly unravel when you use it to tug the wick through the lighter.
If you find replacing the wick on your lighters to be particularly troublesome, perhaps try this method? About six inches of wire should be more than enough. Once the wick is through, simply roll or fold up the excess wire and stuff it into the lighter along with the wadding.
Once the new wick was inserted, it was just a matter of packing in fresh wadding. Now this isn’t strictly necessary, but I like to replace the wadding with fresh wadding when I restore my lighters. The wadding is ordinary cotton wool balls so they cost nothing, anyway. The average lighter (eg – Zippos, and lighters of that size) typically take 6-8 balls, firmly packed inside. Once it was full, I put the cap on and then looked at the flint.
The next step was to replace the flint. Now this lighter didn’t have a flint when I bought it, but I have plenty of spares, so it was easy enough to unscrew the screw and spring on the flint-tube and drop in a fresh flint and then screw it shut again. Now what some people may not be aware of, is the fact that the majority of antique lighters actually take TWO flints!
One flint goes into the flint-tube at the top of the lighter, the other flint – the spare flint – goes inside the lighter. In the majority of antique lighters (including this one), the spare flint is housed in a TINY compartment INSIDE the fuel-compartment screw-on cap. Simply remove the cap from the fuel-tank and inside should be a little cylindrical cap – unscrew that – the spare flint goes in there. Usually, they’re big enough to hold one flint, but sometimes you can cram two in there.
Removing the Engraving
Once all the working parts of the lighter had been seen to, the next thing to address was the engraving on the snuffer-cap.
Now personally, I hate engravings. Unless it’s a gift, a dedication, reward, a date, or a monogram, I find them really tacky and unsightly. Given a choice, I’d almost always prefer an antique without an engraving. That said, some engravings can be fun because they add something to the object – a date, an event, an important name, etc. In some antiques, engravings can be a useful dating or research prompt.
Not in this case. The engraving of the owner’s initials just didn’t add anything to the lighter. So I decided to remove it.
Removing the engraving was just a matter of polishing. Lots and lots of polishing. I started with 200-grit sandpaper for the initial scrubbing, then moved up to 400-grit paper, and then finally, 0000-grade steel wool, mixed with sewing-machine oil and Brasso. What you’re doing with this process of polishing and sanding, is removing the surrounding metal, a microscopic layer at a time, until the surrounding metal reaches the lowest point of the engraving. Once the metal is level again, the engraving will disappear, leaving smooth, glossy metal (in this case, brass) behind!
Of course, this can only be done properly once, so you need to be very careful. Fortunately, the engraving on this lighter was very shallow, so removing it was no challenge.
Once that was gone, it was simply a matter of polishing the entire lighter, to remove as much of the grime and blemishes, marks, tarnishing and crud as possible. The lighter would never look 100% brand-new, what with plating-loss and such, but it at least looked clean and attractive enough to be picked up and used!
Fueling up the Lighter
The final step in the restoration was, of course, making sure that the lighter works! I juiced up the fuel-tank with four or five generous squirts of lighter-fluid and screwed the cap on.
Lighters like this 1920s Dunhill are designed to be operated by one hand – indeed, by one FINGER of one hand – typically the thumb. In normal operation, the lighter is held upright with the flint-tube facing towards you (so that you’re looking at the lighter from ‘behind’, with the lift-arm snuffer-cap facing away from you).
The lift-arm is flipped up using the thumb, and then the flint-wheel is struck rapidly from right to left. Assuming that everything is clean and functional, one half-turn of the flint-wheel is all it takes to create enough sparks to light the fuel-vapours and ignite the lighter.
Help! My Lighter Won’t Light!?
When it comes to repairing or restoring antique lighters, this is one of the most annoying things ever. You spend all that time lavishing care on your newfound lighter, and the damn thing just refuses to repay your kind attentions by deigning it necessary to carry out its primary function – lighting up!
Why not??
Antique lighters fail to light for a number of reasons. Here are some of the most common ones:
There’s No Fuel!
Probably the most obvious reason – there’s no go-juice in the tank! Antique lighters take liquid fuel – typically some manner of petroleum spirits. For there to be enough fuel to burn, the tank needs to be full. The cotton wadding soaks up the fuel and the wick transports this fuel up to the top of the lighter. But if there isn’t enough fuel, it’s not going to reach the wick. The lighter is full when you’ve thoroughly saturated all the wadding (typically 4-5 generous squirts of the can will be enough).
The wick is too short…
Antique lighters have wicks, just like old-fashioned oil-lamps or candles. And the same principles apply – if the wick is too short, then there’s nothing to burn! Now, on a properly functioning lighter, it’s not the wick itself that burns. What burns is the fuel-vapour around the wick that is drawn up through capillary action. But if the wick is too short, there isn’t enough surface-area above the top of the lighter for there to be enough vapour to light.
This is easily remedied by tugging out the wick until it’s long enough for the sparks to catch the fuel-vapour. Typically, the wick should be as high as the top of the windshield, or as high as the top of the snuffer-cap.
The wheel isn’t sparking
Another really common reason as to why lighters won’t light is because there’s no spark to get it going.
When you strike a light, you spin the corrugated flint-wheel or striking-wheel against the small pellet of flintstone inside the lighter. The corrugations scrape the flint and this produces sparks – it’s a principle known for hundreds of years that steel plus flint = sparks.
But this won’t happen if there isn’t enough friction between the flint and the wheel for the lighter to spark properly. Why is this?
There’s three reasons.
1). The flint isn’t touching the flint-wheel.
A REALLY common problem with old lighters is that when you buy them ‘in the wild’ in flea-markets, etc, they often still have old, corroded flints inside them! These old flints are beyond saving, and they’re often impossible to spark. They must be removed from the flint-tube, and a new flint should replace it. To remove the flint, just take the flint-tube cap and spring out, and tap the old flint out.
Sometimes if it’s stuck, you may need to tap the lighter on a table or something, to coax it out. If it’s REALLY stuck up in there, you can use something like a nail, a pin or a screwdriver to smash up the flint and pick at it. This will break up the flint into chunks and they should fall out on their own. Use pipe-cleaners or toothpicks to make sure that all the flint is gone, and then replace the old flint with a new flint.
2). The compression is incorrect.
Every lighter that operates with a flint has a flint-spring inside it. This spring is used to apply pressure to the flint, so that it’s kept hard-up against the side of the flint-wheel, so that when you spin the wheel, there’s enough friction to generate sparks. If you spin the wheel and there’s no sparks, (or very few sparks) then there’s probably either not enough (or too much) pressure from the flint-spring pressing on the flint.
Fix this by fiddling with the screw-cap at the end of your flint-tube. The tighter you screw it shut, the more pressure and friction there is, the looser it is, the less pressure and friction there is. Typically, the tighter you can get it, the better the lighter will work. But, you can get it SO TIGHT that there’s no way for the wheel to spin. If so, loosen the screw-cap slightly until there’s just enough laxity for the wheel the spin, but enough compression that the spring holds the flint against the wheel.
Now when you strike the wheel, the lighter should light.
3). The wheel is clogged!
Another reason why the lighter may not strike right is because the corrugations on the flint-wheel are clogged with gunk (either dust, lint, or more commonly – flakes and chips of old, corroded flints). All that gunk means that the edges of the corrugations can’t catch the flint and strike it. This grime can be removed using a stiff brush and plenty of scrubbing.
That said, another reason your lighter may not strike is because the flint-wheel is simply worn out. This is VERY rare, because flint-wheels last almost forever, but it can happen. If it does…well…sorry to say it, but you have a dead lighter. But, barring that, just about any antique lighter in decent condition can be made to be serviceable again.
Closing Remarks
That pretty much brings this little saga to a close. While some might baulk at the idea of lavishing this much attention on a cigarette lighter, it is nonetheless, a very old and I think, beautiful cigarette lighter, and one that was well worth the effort used to improve its condition, to something resembling its original appearance.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this posting! Perhaps it’s given you some instruction on how to fix your own antique or vintage lighters that you’ve collected, inherited or found in the wild. I’ve always wanted a functioning, Dunhill lift-arm lighter from the 20s. They’re iconic! And I was so glad to have the opportunity to breathe new life into this worn-looking antique.
