Real Or Fake Shermack Type III?

I'd appreciate your opinions on whether or not this is a legitimate Shermack Type III perforation.

Looks like it to me (although I'm no expert). Yours does have considerably wide margins and is quite well centered. But since these stamps were created from imperfs., it probably is accurate.

I have several of these myself, and while I don't have the most up-to-date catalog, I find it interesting that the Schermack Type III's on virtually all of the issues where they were used, carry a LOWER catalog value than the non-Schermack varieties, therefore I can't see much point in anyone trying to fake them ... although anything's possible.

The Schermack type III normally has an horizontal inside of about 20mm, but this does vary. The vertical is 12.75mm bottom to top with 4.75mm cutouts with 3.25mm space between. The left side features on your stamp appear to be about .75mm lower than the right side and the spacing does seem wider. During the Schermack punching process the sheet may have been repositioned for some reason. I have seen other examples with this vertical shift and they have also displayed more horizontal variance. Many of these examples had the distinctive Schermack affixing machine blade cuts. I believe this is a Schermack process anomaly.

Thanks to all.

Russ, what source did you use to get the dimensions?

Tomiseksj
From Richard Doporto
http://www.slingshotvenus.com/stamp..._III_doc.pdf

That's a great resource on the Schermack III's! Never saw it before.

That website has some great (and very detailed) material on what to look for in early fakes/forgeries, etc. I'd venture to guess that not many people on SCF knew about it (until now).

Thanks for sharing.

Thanks Russ. I'd been to the Doporto website before but hadn't seen the Schermack info. Agree with wt1 -- a great resource that I now have bookmarked!