Finest Tongs Money Can Buy

Well not really but they are about the best you would ever be able to find. I will admit being mostly a used stamp collector I never used tongs. When I had to handle the better stamps I made sure to wash my hands and handled them by their sides.

Well since I purchased my MNH stamps I wasn't going to use my hands so I need some tongs. The problem was they would take a few days to arrive if I ordered them.

The answer was at Wall Mart. I picked up the best tweezers I could find. Then it was time for the dremmel as I started to fashion the everyday tweezers into stamp tongs. I shaped the ends into a nice semi rounded spade shape. After that I made the one end a little slimmer by grinding of some metal.

After I had my final shape I polish the stainless steel tweezers on all sides including the inside. Make sure to do the inside because the steel can be a little rough. Now I have the best stamp tongs money can built to the specifications that I wanted.

I plan on making some more custom designs to see what works well.

How clever of you mkfarm

Dianne

MKfarm

Maybe you can market your tongs

You might try making a pair like I have with the ends like small disks. They are great for "loosening" stuck stamps without having a corner of the tongs cut the stamp. Of course if it is a costly one, cut the page out of the album and soak it off.......yeah, a couple of times on auction albums.

Oh, and they use to make a gold plated pair of stamp tongs, but I haven't seen them lately

Jim

Jim
can you post a picture of your tongs with the disks on them ? I would like to see what they look like

Rick,

Wife and son ...and camera is off on vacation, which is just as well as now I can't find my tongs after the use to reorganize GBritain. I am worried that I swept them off with the discarded old hinges as I remounted....and Trash man cometh. I am hoping they are in between pages or something. However they look like this and I believe were made in Germany or Sweden at least 30+ yrs ago. If I need a new pair, I guess it would be this. Mine had somewhat larger and rounder ends.

http://www.subwaystamp.com/prodinfo...r=ZAGTONT904

Jim

Jim I have one pair of Tweezers..yes we sometimes call them that..i have lost them a gazillion times and they always have shown up in a stock book or catalog...my wife misplaced her Europa Michel catalog at the Hartford show..we looked and looked it had all her notations in it...finally she fell back on her old Pray to St. Anthony and sure enough she remembered the dealer where she left it...for her it works !!

Jim

thanks for the photo. I know what you mean yesterday I put my tongs down and could not find them for several hours, then I moved an album and there they were. My tongs sometimes have trouble lifting a single stamp

Tongs seem to get lost a lot, but always turn up. I have an upstairs pair and a downstairs pair. Misplacing one is maddening, but if after a bit of looking they don't turn up, I just go get the other. I've had these two spade tipped pairs almost forever. One goes back to the 1950's, the other to the 1960's. Lately I've been careful to hang the one pair over the side of a small box of glassines containing stamps I'm working with instead of just putting them down, and it's been a while since they've gone astray and I've had to go running for the others.

I too have a bad habit of misplacing mine. So much so that over the years I've had to acquire three just so I could find one of them when I needed it. While mkfarm gets points for mcguyver like ingenuity, I would suspect that tweezers would have more tension than you would want. Meaning you need to squeeze harder than you would with tongs to use them. Investing in good quality tongs is practically square one for collectors. I've used many and want to recommend what I use in case anyone needs some direction here. Mine are Showgard model #905. These are very similar to what desertgem shows. They have a round spade that is very very thin. This thinness has been crucial so many times in safely removing a stamp or a hinge remnant. The ones that scare me are the ones that come to a point though they seem to be very popular.

I solved the problem of loosing my tongs. I bought 3 pair.... I also prefer the spade tipped with about a 30 degree bend at the ends. It is easier on the hands than trying to tilt the page so you can come straight at it.

I fixed my own tong alien abduction problem by having four pair. Three at home and one at work. Now I can almost always find at least on pair when I need them. It's usually not the same pair, but since they're all the same it doesn't really matter.

Do you ever lose your stamp tongs at a club or stamp show? A few people I know, have solved that by putting a piece of masking tape around the handle end and either just putting a dot of colour on it, or their name. There aren't many different types of tongs so you are bound to have a few people with the same ones. It makes it a lot easier to identify your own after you have set them down on a table along side others. No question about which are yours. Also if someone else accidently picks them up they realize quickly that they have picked up the wrong ones.
I prefer the long handled really pointy tongs. Like a good knife, as long as you are careful, they do the job really well.
Oh speaking of knives, one lady in our stamp club prefers to use a knife for removing stamps from pages. She gets chased away from a lot of the dealers tables. She slips the knife under the edge of the stamp and then puts her thumb on top of the stamp to pull it off the page. She is still baffled when she is told she can't do it that way.

hey mkfarm if I send you a pair of tweezers and a few diamond tips for the dremel will you make me a pair?