"AC-Titan" Spark Plug Insulator: Very Early; See The Story Below! Type 3 ca 1919

Description

Here's the story behind this and several other insulators I'm offering on this store.  I know because I was there.
A customer bought one of these and sent me this email:
Dan....
I will check out your listings again....I soaked the core I got from you in Westley's Tire bleach in a small plastic bottle here on my desk for three hrs.
I rinsed it off, and it is now a chain pull on my desk lamp...it looks new! see photos.
Love Your History notes.
I am retired from Flint's AC Spark Plug manufacturing plant.  From 1980-84 I worked in the shell fabrication area as a Roto-Forge operator.  This was all a part of the plant known as the "AC Coal Mine" because of all the black dust in the air.
Across the isle from my Rota-Forge in the front of the shell press-room, a new press was going to be brought into the plant in 1983.  Preliminary work was to break up the already thick concrete floor and dig WAY down under the floor to prepare for a deep concrete foundation to be poured for the new press.
As the construction crew dug down with a back hoe, about 8 feet down the bucket started coming up with old AC plugs that were discovered to be buried down there!  Each bucket full brought up more and more plugs until there were thousands of them in the big dirt pile off to the side.  The plugs were no good as spark plugs because the shells were so rusty you could pick one up and usually peel most of the rusty shell off the insulator with your bare hands.
Word spread among the employees and management gave approval for people to take them home as
souvenirs
.  Many went out of the plant that way.  After the rusty shell was removed you had a perfect insulator in most cases, showing no trace of the fact that it had been underground since the 1920's.  I took home a few myself, and had given away the old insulators to friends by the time I moved out of Flint in 1995.
About two years ago I bought out a collection of AC collectibles from a retired gentleman in his late 70's.  As soon as I saw these insulators I knew the backstory on them.   OH!  I almost forgot.  The "Coal Mine" where I worked used to be an orchard next to the original AC plant, built in 1923-25 as the Dort Motor Car Factory on Dort Highway.  During and after WWII, AC won many contracts for the U.S. military, so they took out the orchard (where they had been dumping defective plugs that weren't good enough to pack out for sale to the public).  Sometimes that was nothing more than a defective stencil on the insulator)  and built a new plant over that vacant land, which made it now a big half-mile long factory.
This one has the "AC-Titan" stencil and measures 2-1/8" long.  I have an early auto parts catalog dated 1919 that shows this stencil.  A manufacturing reject that was one of probably millions that were buried for years before the factory was extended over the burial ground.  Today that entire half-mile area is a concrete floor with trees growing through the cracks.  But even today, 35 years after I worked in that department, I'm sure I could show you where all those scrap plugs are still buried that were NOT dug up when the machine foundation was put in.  But there is a high fence and no trespassing anywhere on that property.
Look for many more collectibles that I am listing on my store.
Down through the years Buick and other General Motors factories would offer so many other great collectibles commemorating plant-sponsored events.  That's why there are so many cool collectibles that have the manufacturer's name on them.
Condition is good but not excellent.
See photos.
Mailed in a padded mailer.  Yes, I gladly will combine shipping on orders of multiples to save you postage costs.
NOTE: I notice lately that when a customer makes multiple orders from my store, Ebay stacks up all the individual postage costs and customers are having to pay it.  So I am combining all those orders and I have made a practice of refunding all that extra postage back to the customer's Paypal account and doing it 3 times a week.
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