John,
The little I know, learned from reading on Stamp Community about reperfing, and having seen khj manipulate some images, is shown below in my modified version of your scan.
Shown is the bottom of your stamp with red lines added across the stamp, and then a snippet of a scan from the top perfs of your stamp.
In order to add this snippet you have to scan your original picture and leave lots of black space around the stamp. Then in Paint or another program paste in the top perfs onto the pic of the bottom perfs and line the perfs up, or try to.
Immediately you can see if there are any irregularities in perfing between the top / bottom (or sides if you compare the sides).
Quite similar to your excellent way of checking perfs by holding up a similar stamp of known perfs to the edge of the one in question.
In this case, as the perfs do line up, this helps to prove that no reperfing has happened, as reperfing sometimes (or most times) is done a bit off from where it should be if not done with extreme care). Pay attention also to where the frame lines or edges of the design are and if they line up also (not sown of my example).
The red lines are drawn on your 4d stamp to help with what I think may have been the questionable appearance of the bottom perfs to an untrained eye. They seem to travel up and down in their journey across the stamp, the problem being that some perfs are longer than others, thus giving an illusion of irregularity.
Not having a scan of the back or a close up of any possible perf holes and extra bits of paper left in the holes a person is left to compare what his head is telling him as to what seems straight and true and right, in a leveling sense of the words.
This is not helped by the stamp being tilted a bit to one side in your original scan. Again, a difference that gives an illusion to an untrained eye. You, having dealt with these stamps for years have perhaps, unconsciously , been trained by experience to adjust your perceptions to account for any tilting or perf lengths or hole irregularities, and thus are not fighting against your brain telling you that something is wrong with this picture (when there isn't).
Another way to use the red lines (just produced by Paint program) is to draw lines across the whole stamp from perfs to perfs and see if everything aligns this way also.
Sorry that turned into a general lecture for everyone also I think. Any tweakings to my statements or corrections most welcome.
Posted 10/22/2011 08:43 am
