Baltimore, MD City Type Coil?

Here's another that I need an ID for! The only City Type Coil for Baltimore is 162 with much larger fonts and this is not listed in the "L" section.

Frankie

I'd say it's a Type 162, as the typestyle and distance between letters appears correct. Probably just a worn precancel device that resulted in the odd looking example you have posted in which the city and state names look "squished together".

Maybe I was too hasty in my previous comment. I took a Type 162 Baltimore precancel from my collection and compared it with yours. A side-by-side comparison really shows considerable differences in the height of the letters that makes me think that perhaps you have something different there.



Edit: Now you've really prompted my interest. I found a couple of more Baltimore Coil Precancels that look like a Type 162, but in these side-by-side examples, the left one looks like yours (smaller type squashed together) against the traditional Type 162 (right stamp):



I'd be interested to see if some of our SCF precancel "experts" chime in to provide their comments.

Measurements are needed to cover the possibilities.

Here you go Warrehouse:

Other measurement - two words are 4 to 4.5mm high.
Width of ladder is 19mm wide.

Frankie

Assuming we agree that both right stamps are Type 162, the 1 cent Franklin (left stamp) that I scanned has the following dimensions:

Space between ladder: 9 mm
Letter height: 2 mm
Space between city and state names: 1.5 mm

It seems to me that I recall a number of cities had used some "box cancels" that occasionally could be confused for a precancel. Would any of these examples fall into that category?

With those measures, there is no coil type precancel noted with those dimensions.

So would you say they are undocumented precancels or post cancels/box cancels of some sort that may have been put into use by local postal authorities?

The city coil precancel types [pss-100 series] are the most bent out of shape precancels of all. This is because the coil precancelling machines ran a spool of coils through at high speed. If the machine ran too slow or fast - the vertical dimension could easily be stretched as seen in these examples. A lot of study has been done [none by me!] over the years to identify when different devices were used, as opposed to different measured sizes. So, vertical measurements, while sometimes critical with most precancel identification, are worthless on city coils. When different devices do exist for a city, the differences will appear in the fonts and horizontal spacing of the letters. This has been a much-studied area by experts [again, me not included]. There are 110 different city coil types listed - it is VERY unlikely a new type will be found/acknowledged based on spacing differences. None were added in the update from the 6th to the 7th T&T catalog and none are reported so far in the upcoming updates for the 8th edition.

It is possible it is a provisionally created precancel.
Keep in mind that this precancel device could have used a rubber print source that heat or contact with a chemical could distort & shrink that rubber & PM not having a good replacement could keep on using it.