Help Recognizing Faults

Here are three stamps that I would like to gather opinions on to help me recognize faults and severity of faults.

The first is a Lexington-Concord one cent that appears to me to be very well centered and free of flaws on the front. The back shows it as MNH and the glue looks undisturbed and original to me.. but it has a bit a ink which appears to have been picked up from another stamp immediately after production. Is this much ink considered a "Minor Fault" or "Fault?" Are there other faults that I am not seeing?




The second is a Scott 650 that appears almost perfectly centered and has large margins. The reverse again shows some ink but hard to tell if this is picked up from another stamp. Sorry about the piece of lent on the lower right reverse. Again, minor fault of more? Other faults?




The third is a Scott 701 which again is very nearly perfectly centered. The glue appears original and undisturbed but the back of the stamp shows a wrinkling effect? Fault?

The ink on the back is not a fault. The sheets were stacked after printing, so some of the wet ink transferred to the back of sheets stacked on top of each other.

The Lexington Concord has a bad perf on the lower right. I don't know if this is from a bent perf pin or something else, but it does detract from the value.

The 5 cent stamp looks good. It does look like it has 2 or 3 short perfs on the bottom. These are very minor faults, and plenty of ebay sellers wouldn't even note them.

I think the last stamp has the type II gum breakers, which had multiple ridges like this. Not a fault, intentionally designed that way to prevent the rotary printed stamp from curling.

Thanks... I am learning. How would you describe the centering on the 5 cent stamp?

For what it's worth, I don't think the 5-cent stamp is bad in terms of centering, but it is far from "perfect" either. When you put a ruler to it it becomes a bit easier to see just how slightly off-center the stamp really is:



On the other hand, the stamp isn't so valuable that such small centering issues would be that great of a detraction from the stamp.

wt1....the stamp is scanned at a angle....
Use the ruler method from the perfs....much better centered than you giving credit for.

With scanned stamps, I use my arrow cursor to see how much of the margin it fills. I do this on all 4 sides to get a general idea of where the centering is off.

My two cents worth is as follows.

The Lexington faults as mentioned.

The 650 has several short perfs on the top. (Bottom when looking at adhesive side) Centering will not win any prizes.

The 701 looks pretty good to me. Gum ridges are normal as stated. Centering of this one is less than perfect as well.

I believe wt1's centering comment refers to left and right centering rather than the stamp being scanned at an angle. Attention to the red arrows clearly show a definite off center of the image to the left.

The ink on the gum side is commonly called offset, but the proper technical term is setoff. A perfectionist will deduct for it, but most collectors will accept some and each person has to decide how much "some" is - and if you find one with very strong setoff where you can see the full design clearly, you get bonus points from EFO collectors (Errors, Freaks & Oddities). In this case it does appear to be setoff, but sometimes you will find stamps with ink on the back that had their gum (what you call glue) got stuck to the top of another stamp and then when they were separated it pulls off some of the ink (in such a case you will often find bits of paper fibers on the gum too).

The short perfs mentioned are not so short that everyone would consider them a fault.

The centering on the 1c looks really good. The centering on the 5c isn't quite as nice, but is still pretty nice (this particular stamp issue tends to have rather large margins, so no bonus for that on yours). The 50c is nice left to right but is low - still nice enough most would find it acceptable.

Gum breaker ridges were pressed into the stamps to prevent curling. They are typicallt strong and have a regular spacing. Smaller irregular/random cracking in the gum comes from changes in the humidity - the 1c and 5c look normal, can't tell on the 50c.

I straightened the scan and then used an application called 'Screen Calipers' to demonstrate the relative measurements (in pixels) of the left and right margins. Of course if you wanted to get accurate units of measure in inches or millimeters you would need to have a scanned image that is the same size as the stamp. You can switch between horizontal and vertical calipers and there are multiple units of measure (disabled in the 'demo' version).


I have been using the 'demo' version for quite a few years and find it very handy. You can get more information and download the demo version of Screen Calipers on their web site http://www.iconico.com/caliper/. The full version is $29.95 (US).
don

That's a great tool and would be just as useful in the sports card hobby - thanks for posting that

Thanks all. This has been educational and helpful. I like the digital caliper as well.