I made some serious progress restoring the shattered no embossing Locke 25 top I dug up this last summer . On a recent visit with Paul Greaves we fracture sealed every micro fracture and defect in every shard of glass . I then assembled 80% of the top with UV glass glue including the crown and most of the umbrella . I am going to leave part of the top separate till next spring and go back to spend a few days reworking the pole site in hopes of finding most of the remaining shards... (damn it... they have to be there! ) Paul and I concluded this top and many of it's unembossed early production brothers were basically hand gathered and made on a large hand press rather then on a production machine. Every top is unique with a different amount of glass being used for the pressing . I am going to do a mold study next year to compare the shards of as many of these unmarked units as I can locate pieces for and see if more then one mold was used or if they were all made in the same mold . We know five different molds were used for making the regular embossed production Locke #25 top skirts which would likely correspond to positions on a semi-automatic production machine . The later insulators with embossing tend to be very uniformly made with very little variation in glass thickness indicting automatic metering out of the raw hot glass . Making the large steel molds for these big glass tops was an expensive time consuming process and I would guess Brookfield made only one mold to make the first examples and held off making additional molds or embossing the original mold until a large order requiring a regular production run materialized . With the Locke 25 likely having first been made in late 1902 and the first and only production run occurring in mid-late 1904 I feel like I am beginning to understand the sequence of events in the brief life and history of this insulator design .