Coil Stamp 2128 - Red Bergamot Blossom

Hi,

I was under the impression that all the subject coil stamps had an horizontal serpentine die cut on both top and bottom.

The bottom of the stamp below is slightly weavy and has nibs. I don't know which part of the roll it might come from. Comments would be appreciated.

Hi Major1044, I am not very good at Canadian coils, but here in the US that would be either the beginning or the end of a roll. I do not have any idea why a roll can not start or end with a normal die cut! Also, here the beginning and the last cut on the roll are usually different!

PeterT

Thanks for your comments Petert4522,

All the coil rolls that I have seen from the flower definives issued since 2004 appears to have a gutter start and finish attached to the stamps. Furthermore the Unitrade Specialised Catalogue of Canadian Stamps does not specify otherwise.

Maybe some rolls have been made differently, Maybe the above stamp is just an error. With my limited knowledge, I am still in the dark.

You might appreciate this article:

http://www.adminware.ca/LoweMartin/...ng-jul24.pdf

The lower edge may have but cut by an affixing machine used by a large mailer or a customer ripping the stamps from a dispenser.

This is fairly common on USA coils.

Thanks for your referral Lorddenning,

I have read this article by Robin Harris. I find it very informative and technical. I will have to read it a few more times to catch it all. For now I am still confused.

Thanks for your comments DStamp,

You might be right, however I believe that if this stamp was ripped from a dispenser, the bottom wouldn't be waved and the nibs (evenly spaced) wouln't be there.

I've never seen a stamp like yours. The evenly spaced nibs make me think that it was some kind of perforation error during the printing process.

Here's what the the normal starter, gutter strip and end strip coils look like. From a 2011 Canadian issue.

The starter and end strips are always (at least on modern coils) torn through the inscription tab (traffic lights, printer, etc.)

Thanks for your comments and pics BlackJag.

In the pic below we can see the difference with a normal coil stamp. The subject stamp is in fact shorter than normal. I believe that, somehow, it was shaped above its normal die cut. How and why? I don't know!

The Lowe-Martin produced coil stamps (rolls), as this stamp is, are printed and die-cut on one press.

The completed self-adhesive rolls are then stored in the Lowe-Martin plant until such time as final production is required.

Final production includes slitting the large roll of stamp paper into individual coil rolls of 100 (in this example) or 50 stamps. After every 100/50 stamps, the roll is separated from the next roll by shallow, curved cuts ... as seen at the bottom of the example in this thread.

Normally (dare I say nearly 99.9% of the time) this cutting is done in the middle of the "gutters" found along the roll at every 10 stamp-interval.

In this example, that cutting occured within the normal stamp design, resulting in a shorter stamp than usual. (That means that the adjacent roll would have ended up with an extra large gutter piece.)

This is a very nice find and would likely be "in demand" by collectors of Lowe-Martin produced coil stamps.

Thanks for your explanations studystamps,

I will file this stamp with my unlisted varieties...and be on the lookout for additional copies.