India Elephant Lighter Restoration

Restoration of an Indian elephant cigarette lighter in a very bad condition. I will do my best to restore this beauty from India.

A subscriber from India sent me this very damaged cigarette lighter from his hometown New Delhi. He was so kind also to send me a very fine elephant statue of Lord Ganesha or Ganesh – a very worshiped Hindu god. Its very fine and will now be a true friend at my new Awesome Playground.

Restoration Process
I started by wondering if I really could restore this lighter. It was old and the elephant part was made of thin pewter with several holes. Anybody who has worked with thin pewter and trying to repair holes in thin pewter knows it is a NIGHTMARE. You need heat to fix it, but too much heat and it will all melt down. I had to repair 2 holes and I also created a new leg and attached it to the elephant.

The lighter part was made of cheap and thin mixed metal it looked like brass but it wasn’t. So yes, it’s not as easy as doing a Zippo lighter restoration. But here we go! AWESOME as I am 😉

I started by separating the lighter part from the elephant part – I did use a bit of heat but easy job. I choose to use baking soda when doing the sandblasting part because I think that regular sand would have gone thru the thin pewter and would have vanished to many details away from the elephant.
After that I did the pewter casting job to repair the holes. I started by filling the elephant with special casting sand and casted the two holes with success. I protected the surrounding area with clay. I also casted a new leg for the Indian beauty. I used a lot of time hammering and grinding to get it right and to get the new leg to fit in on the old animal.

The lighter part was an easy fix. The metal was just so poor that I didn’t separate anything. I just cleaned it as it was in my mini tumbler. I added a new flint stone and a new lighter spring, a new wick and added some new cotton balls. I filled it with Zippo lighter petrol, and I ignited, and it worked very well.

It was a cool restoration video to make and and my first item from India that I have ever restored. Hopefully more to come. ❤

Please subscribe if you want to see more cool upcoming restoration projects 🙂 And DON’T FORGET TO SEE my WW2 Rare hip flask restoration video: https://youtu.be/_Qjp5V5rWkg
Thanks for watching my channel. See you soon.
Best wishes and stay safe ❤ Martin