1969 Bottom Stamp

When writing this page, I discovered that I did not own a lighter with the early 1969 bottom stamp, so I set out to address this. I searched EBay looking for 1969 Zippos, bidding on most and winning a few. All the ones I won had the late bottom stamp. I also noticed that where the auction had the stamp photographed, the majority also had the late stamp.

I decided to record the details in a database to record my findings. In a 6 month period there were 478 1969 Zippos advertised on EBay of these 276 showed a photograph of the bottom stamp. Only 29 of the 276 had the early stamp.

Taking account of the date above, just over 10% of the lighters I have seen have the early stamp, so I would have to speculate that the stamp changed quite early in the year.

Obviously, without historical records from Zippo it is impossible to confirm, but I would guess that the change over took place in March or April of 1969