SC # 396 Combination Perf's Revisited...

Just received today... so may variables
which could have caused this...

Opinions, please?

Someone with poor eyesight and too much caffeine having fun with a pin?

You should be looking for what kind of scissors make this kind of cut. Try a sewing forum.

chasa, when I first looked at it, I figured "metal comb," not sewing scissors. If you had a coil with messed up perfs at right, pushed one of those sharp metal animal/pet combs through your stamp then pulled it out sideways, you might get something like that..."gauge" and diameter look about right. http://www.1allsystems.com/prodotti...mb_50.50.jpg

The edge of the dispensing machine would have had some kind of tear bar. For some reason this one was not smooth. This stamp came out of the machine a bit short and this might well be the result.

I saw this one on another thread just a few days ago. It looks almost like what my Scotch tape will do on one of these cheap dispensers when it does not want to get cut properly.

Peter

Positively remarkable how those whom "wish they had"
what someone else has, can only find to ridicule and
make light of, and do not bother to use their God-given
intellect to properly analyze and provide a hypothesis
for the benefit of others, based upon research and logic...

Something like the following antique stamp dispenser
would have been a much more *mature* posting than a
(suspiciously mentioned) pet's comb...



http://www.ebay.com/itm/Unique-Vint...em1c43e2bf15



Go ahead... make my day...

None of my girl's fancy scissors had small or pointy enough teeth to make this cut. So to further philatelic knowledge I went after a lovely example of the 1 cent Franklin with a plastic scotch tape dispenser. The results were disappointing. I wish I still had my big, heavy, metal desktop tape dispenser...

Agree with revcollector, especially since the tear/cut is not straight. Someone was pulling it out at an angle, in a hurry, apparently. Still, a fun piece.

Partime... positively... and, after going through
hundreds and hundreds of listings for antique stamp
dispensers, one must conclude the edge (was not)
created by any of them, given they all have straight,
smooth slots...

However... there are numerous listings for Shermack
stamp dispensing machines... some of which mechanically
"chop" the stamp (presumably the imperf coils), and
others which 'bite' the stamp off with an 'alligator'
cutting mechanism... which this appears to possibly
be... (or) the old lever-type dispenser which is a
manual tear-off...

One hypothesis would be perf 8½ stamps having been
mistakenly loaded into an 'alligator' dispenser vs
a tear-off model...

Here's a beauty...

There does not seem to be a gradual angle to the teeth as if the stamp were pulled at an angle against a tear bar. It also seems it would be hard to get such a clean yet uneven cut with the next perfs being so close. The 6 bottom teeth look fairly even, then the middle 7 teeth, and finally the top 8 teeth. That makes me think scissors cut in 3 swipes.

If dispensed from a machine, wouldn't there be other examples of such stamps to be found?

Anyhow, looks like scissors cut to me. My kids fancy scissors don't do this cut exactly, but then again, the cut was done long ago with adult scissors. The cut reminds me of sewing scissors my mother used to have.

If the strange perf had been a single cut line I would tend to agree it might be from a stamp dispenser. But raymodj makes a good point, this thing has been cut at least three times. This seems to make it more likely that the stamp was attached to an envelope and someone hacked at it trying to open it with some sewing scissors.
Don

Maybe someone was shredding documents and caught this, just about, in the nick of time.