Another Successful Soak

This one turned out very well, in my opinion. Not a sound stamp, but infinitely more attractive now. I bought it on ebay specifically for a soaking attempt, thinking that I might be able to improve it.

Warm to hot water, a few drops of dish soap, about 3 minutes using tongs to "pull" the stamp through the water, then a rinse in clean water, and then 3 days in a Desert Magic drying book with about 30 pounds of weight on it to press out the stamp.

Seller's before picture (Ickypoo!!):




After:

Revenuecollector, I also soak stamps, but always let mind dry in the Desert Magic Drying book for five days. Personal choice I guess.

Good results on your first attempt.

Good luck in future if you plan on soaking other stamps!

Cheers

Dave

Impressive results. I've got a few candidates to try this on.

Very nice!. I know I'll get grief for mentioning this. But I did a similar thing with a modern stamp to fill a space in my album.
Knowing that current papers, inks in the design and cancelations are permanent; I had a '70's issue that was on yellow paper and had stained the stamp. So first I tried a Peroxide solution. That failed, so I used a (after rinsing) light bleach solution. BINGO!! Looked like a freshly issue from a white envelope.
After soaking for a while in fresh water, all trace odor was gone. Design crisp, with no variation from a MNH issue on side by side comparison. The cancel was crisp and unchanged.
Made a nice hole filler!

What a difference. I like how the stamp looks so clean now compared to the before picture, where the stamp looks soiled on the front.

Of course if you haven't taken quite a bit of care choosing the dish soap, it'll now fluoresce under UV light, showing it as cleaned. Most dish soaps use phosphates to whiten and the residuals fluoresce.

Is that why the pen cancel now appears (For lack of a better term.) duller?

Could be the cleansing action of the soap, or a water soluble element in the pigment. Tough to tell without going back to original and resoaking it with just clean water.

Next time try Ivory Hand Soap. Work the bar of soap between your hands until you see some suds and then dip the stamp. (clean hands first!) -- P.S. Use luke warm water - not hot.

Be careful not to conclude too much regarding color and ink saturation from the pre- and post pictures, as they were not done on the same device (the "before" is the ebay seller's picture).

In retrospect, I should have created my own "before" picture on the same scanner with the same settings, to provide a more valid comparison.