To save you from reading all my research on this, this section, I'll tell you that I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone. No evidence so far of anybody making vinyl lined tanks, whether they called them glass-lined or not.
It's conceivable the one I took apart was not labeled glass-lined. I might have thought it was because the one I had just installed had that label. Hmmm. If I'd known that some ARE glass lined, I wouldn't have been so willing to accept the one with the crushed top and the input pipe being no longer perfectly vertical. I figured that couldn't hurt vinyl but it could hurt glass.
Could the glass chip and get into my hot water? I'd hate to get the glass in my washcloth and then try to wash myself. Once in college I pulled a piece of paper out of my wastebasket to make a paper wad for throwing, and I'd forgotten that a thermometer in a broken glass tube was in the trash and I cut up my hands wadding the paper. Not badly but in several places.
Sears is out of business I think, so that will make it harder***, but I plan to look. But if I do find the very same model, it might merely say, "glass-lined" with no description of what that means. AFAICR, that's what it said when I first bought one or more of them.
***But google proved me wrong:Den't read this. Only included because it shows that AOSmith was/is one of the makers of Sears WHs.
So I used another tack and looked for glass-lined, and by golly, one is by AOSmith:
There there are 114 under the home-depot section glass-lined tank:
But I found Are A. O. Smith water heaters glass lined? A. O. Smith changed the water heater market over 80 years ago by introducing the glass-lined tank for all tank water heaters. By lining the inside of the water heater with glass, heat stays within the tank and protects the steel exterior from rusting and becoming a safety risk.
Yes, but it didn't have the strands that fiberglass has. It was slightly hard to separate from the metal case around it, because it was pretty stiff and had been next to the metal for years and it was hard to find a place to grab it, and I think I had to pry it away, but when I did, it bent like a thick rubber mat meant to stand on at a work station. It was milky to clear in color. That is, iirc you could see a millimeter or two into it. I should have saved some of it but for once, I didn't. (After I got it in two pieces and brought it upstairs, I cut it in a lot of pieces to throw away with the weekly trash pickup, sort of like in a Hitchcock episode.)
Not in my case. Not glazed at all.
Yes, a good one.
Because the ceiling is not high enough, I guess.
BTW, I noted the complaints from 3, maybe 4 people about my replying to more than one person at once. I know Usenet is not email but for lack of a Usenet authority, I checked with the greatest email sage I know and she, Katrina, said it was fine. That that was how it was supposed to wrok.
Maybe this will help. I'm not replying to specific people, so the attribution line at the top doesn't reflect that I am. Rather, I'm giving my opinions or facts and I put some of my lines after lines from the preceding post (including lines from prior posts quoted in the preceding post) so that if my meaning is not clear, readers can use the quoted lines to tell what I'm talking about**, not to tell who I am talking to. I'm talking TO everyone with every line.
**Like in this post, I don't explain that I'm talking about a water heater, or that someone said it sounded like fiberglass. When I give the distinction, that it doesn't have fibers, readers can look in the line above to see that the suggestion was that it was fiberglass. For the purpose of understanding my words, it doesn't matter who said that, but if someone really wants to know he can find the attribution line, or he can look in the list of preceding posts.So I hope you will just read my words and not worry about who said whatever I'm replying to. Except for a couple trolls, I regard everyone here with the same respect and even when I disagree I don't mean it to be personal.