Worcester, Ma (163?)

One of these is a 162 - which one? And what is the other?

Both fonts are very different and the distance between horizontal lines are much closer together on the left stamp.

C is over the A on the left stamp and over the MA on the right stamp.

Frankie

My Type 163 matches the example on the right. (I don't think Worcester, MA did a Type 162.) Not sure about the first scan. Still waiting for someone with more precancel expertise (or at least a catalog) to determine if this was a separate variety or if they grouped all of these under one listing (with footnotes, perhaps.)

The one on the right is Type 163 as Wt1, the other seems to beanother type, but only the 163 list for Worcester. Can you measure the letters & distance between lines?
Thanks

Here you go Warrehouse:

Other measurement - two words are 5.5 to 6 mm high.
Width of ladder is 19.5mm

Frankie

Again not fitting with known Coil ladder types. All normal block font ladder coils are 3mm letters.

Warrehouse: If you ever want me to send you questionable precancels such as this one for on hand examination, LMK. I'd be more than happy to loan them to you.

Frankie

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.

Chasa, Concur on the Baltimore coil type, But I'd have to say there is no distortion on this issue as there was on the Baltimore. This is shown by Frankie's measurements as 2.5mm seems like an otherwise normal size. Basically I'm saying rubber does not shrink evenly, this is too uniform in it's inking.

Mike