And Now For The News.

Good evening everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and I am wishing you the very best for the coming new year.

I have some good news, and some bad news and some even worse news.

First, the good news. I got stamps for Christmas! WooHoo ! Yippee! Yeeha! Apparently my mother and grand mother have been pulling stamps and post marks off everything they run across for years now and they sent them to me last week. I was very happy!
There are several airmail that I didn't have before, (C135-136). A couple of really high dollar stamps, (#4145, #4018, #3648), and a bunch of the Non-Profit, Bulk Rate stamps, (#3770, #3451, #3207-08). The last batches are going to be my experiments, but I'll get to that in a sec.

The bad news is that pretty much all of the stamps are of the modern self-adhesive variety. Now, I have searched here on the boards as well as online and what I'm finding out is that there has been little progress made in the effort to remove this type of US stamp from its paper.

Now for the worse news. A lot of these stamps came off of packages, and were secured to said packages with… tape. Yes, you read that correctly, the dreaded, bane of stamp collectors around the world, clear scotch tape. Some the tape is only on the barest edge of the perfs. A couple are completely covered in the cra… um, stuff.

So here are the questions. Has anyone made any progress in soaking more modern stamps off paper? Does anyone know how to remove tape, (1980's era) with out destroying the stamp?

I have lots to experiment with as mentioned before so I'm going to try out some of what I've read so far and a few things that have no scientific basis what so ever, so any advice would be helpful.

Thanks tons,
Devlin

i am no means an expert on this as a I collect mint but I get a lot of letters from the USA and lets just say most of the moderrn self adhesive come back in only half paper the whole stamp has one big thin. my suggestion would be to leave those stamps sticking to the paper and just cut as close to the perf as you can for packages peel the bakside of the cardvoars so it becomes as thin as the paper .

Thanks Spock,
Oh By the way, Congrats on your pillardom.


I think I was a little unclear about the packaging. The packages were all wrapped with brown paper. Much like the old paper shopping bags. The problem with those is the tape that was mentioned before.

Hi Devlin,

Try this site:
http://www.virtualstampclub.com/2009usnew.html

I don't know that I agree with all of their conclusions on soakability though. It does give a starting point. Also, it seems to me that most of the self adhesive stamps from a few years back and older soaked okay. It seems that the more recent self adhesives are where most of the non-soakable ones crop up.

Happy new year!

Dave N.
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Thanks Ia m still a little mystified. What happens with pillardom? even the good mod ( and friend) did not say anything about it

It is accepted practice to display self adhesive stamps on the backing they came from or cut square on the cover, if used. This goes all the way back to the first US self adhesive, the Christmas stamp back in the sixties. In others words, don't soak the self adhesive stamp. And pillardom? Ah, I think you have earned, by virtue of your 500 posts the unwavering love of the editors of this chat, or something like that.

no no I had ther unwavering love after the first 5 posts I am trying to figure out pillardom and no tpillar of the community but thanks

Didn't you know? Pillardom entitles the person attaining that lofty apex the right to send free stamps to everyone.

Back to the question about the tape--does it de-value the stamp under it quite a bit??

Thanks!
Gussyboy

wpglwr I guess you need to send me m y share then we never saw any after your pillardom.


your stamps prize is in the mail and by registered post too so it doesnt get adopted by someone else :)

Hi Folks.....

Welcome back Gussy !!

.............Tape of any kind on stamps is never good and in almost all cases it meanas the stamp is ruined. There are a few newer tapes that are pealable without leaving any sticky residue.

of course it will guessboy unless you find a way to take the tape off without damaging the stamp.