Soaking Stamps - Lacquer Thinner Vs Mineral Spirits

While getting some stamps ready for a customer I reached real quick for what I thought was mineral spirits.

After taking the stamps out of the cleaning tin and inspecting them I could not believe the result. Then I looked at the can and saw that it was lacquer thinner instead of the mineral spirits.

Need to read quicker before grabbing something quicker.

Oog, I hate that feeling. Glad to see you are about.

Been real busy with a new job and sorting thru my collection.

I "assume" you are using mineral spirits to remove self-adhesive U.S. stamps? Most members of our club recommend Ronsonol lighter fluid. I seldom have need to remove self-stick stamps, so I haven't tried either method. I leave them on the envelope corner and throw 'em in a box; someday I will give them away.

I never tried the Ronsonol lighter fluid, only the mineral spirits and it seem to do the job.

Too bad your new job isn't sorting through your collection.

I only wish. But when I retire that will be my job!!

I don't bother with modern self adhesive stamps, but I have found that lacquer thinner works very well on older stamps that have adhesive tape stains,I have saved many a classic era worldwide stamp with a short soak in lacquer thinner followed by a peroxide or bleach dip. Purple and some yellow stamps don't fare well though, they tend to disappear, like in the invisible man movies.

One word: OOOOOOOPS

Nells,

Or as they say in comic strips, "#&%^@*)".

No, they really should label those cans more clearly.


-IBFS

Lighter fluid is kind of nasty stuff for being so flammable, so I stay away from it as well. I also use mineral spirits for self-adhesives that won't soak off in water. Well, almost mineral spirits - I use paint thinner, which is primarily mineral spirits. When I went looking for some, all I found was a "green alternative" mineral spirits so I passed on that and went with paint thinner instead. Paint thinner is a bit more smelly than mineral spirits but it's not nearly as strong-scented as lighter fluid.

It works for almost all self-adhesive gums found on stamps that won't soak off in water. France definitives, Brazil, USA, Italy priority post, New Zealand lenticular lens, Spain ATM (note - the thermal printing usually fades a bit), old Tonga & Sierra Leone diecuts, Great Britain Machins with security cuts, etc etc, all of them come off the paper with mineral spirits. Sometimes the gum dissolves completely, but more often some scraping is needed to remove it. I use an old expired credit card - some stamps let go of their gum without any issue, others need extra scraping with my fingernails (Brazil stamps leave a wax behind under the glue, Belarus stamps leave almost all the glue behind and need quite a bit of scraping - each type of gum is different). Where possible, I "chase" the paint thinner with a soak in water after all the gum is gone, but with some issues that isn't possible because water damages the stamp.

The only stamps I still have problems with are some printings of the USA 32c flag over porch with a red 1996 date (paint thinner doesn't soften the glue enough to allow me to remove the paper), an Italian stamp with a hologram (the paint thinner removed the hologram foil), and a Norfolk Island diecut (paint thinner doesn't soften the glue at all). Also, print-on-demand stamps will usually lose their ink because they aren't printed with stable inks. Sometimes those are obvious so I never try to soak them, but sometimes they're tricky - some German private post stamps include a bar code, and the paint thinner removes that ink while leaving the stamp image intact. Oh well, live and learn. Where possible, I always start with a damaged stamp when I'm trying to learn about how to soak a new kind of stamp.

I'll eventually try other solvents on these other stamps in the search for something that softens the glue without damaging the stamp. I've already ruled out d-limonene cleaners, I've had too many problems with stamp designs being damaged before the glue was soft enough to remove the stamp from the paper.

Ryan

Lacquer thinner causes cancer and blindness, mineral spirits offers lead poisoning instead. Both, and lighter fluid also, should only be used in well ventilated areas and the cautions on the labels should be followed.

Mineral spirits are hydrocarbons, strictly hydrogen and carbon atoms with no lead. Health issues with mineral spirits are largely confined to solvent abuse (inhaling) - in normal usage it is quite benign, as far as chemicals go. Varsol is a mineral spirit adapted for parts cleaning (and paint thinning) purposes, we buy it in 55 gallon drums and it gets used in parts cleaners with electric circulation pumps (like in an aquarium) and an incandescent light bulb on the lid of the machine. If you want to set it on fire you can make it burn, but it's about the safest hydrocarbon solvent there is. We wash parts in it with our bare hands and don't bother washing up with soap until it's lunchtime.

In comparison, naphtha (main ingredient in lighter fluid) has pretty much the lowest boiling point and highest vapour pressure of any petroleum fuel and is consequently very quick to evaporate. Vapours enter the air at a far quicker rate than mineral spirits and the risk of fire is far higher. Add to that its carcinogenic status and its tendency to cause skin rashes and it's a poor second choice for degumming stamps. If you dumped 10 gallons of lighter fluid in the parts washer, you might not make it to lunchtime before you had blown the roof off the shop.

Ryan

Ryan,

Great info on the different solvents. Good to know that mineral spirit are the safest in a well vented area.

When I was a kid my dad had benzine to clean paint brush, that stuff had a strong odor. Do hardware stores still sell that?

Tricky note here - benzine and benzene are two very different things even though they sound just the same. Benzene is carcinogenic and can cause genetic damage and has been phased out of many uses because of that. It used to be a prominent ingredient in gasoline, but is now used only in very small quantities. Nasty stuff!

Benzine is properly known as petroleum ether and, according to Wikipedia, is "useful in removing the gum from self-adhesive stamps". It says it's an ingredient in some of the "goo remover" types of products that are supposed to remove labels and so on. I have four different kinds of goo removers to use in future tests with self-adhesive stamps, only one of which might contain benzine - its label says it includes d-limonene (the citrus stuff) and "hydrocarbons". Benzine is similar to naphtha, the stuff in Ronsonol lighter fluid. Because of rampant confusion with the words benzine and benzene, I don't know if you can find benzine at any kind of consumer-level shop. I've seen old instructions for using benzine to clean and lubricate the types of micrometers we use in the shop, and supposedly a modern equivalent to that is to dilute lighter fluid with Varsol / mineral spirits / paint thinner.

And to make things even more confusing, most Germans call gasoline "Benzin". (I know some who call it "Sprit" - finally, a different sounding word!)

And Bestine, a product recommended by some as a good remover of self-adhesive gum, is different stuff again. It's used as a rubber cement thinner and contains heptane. I've never been able to find any of that up here - I can get contact cement thinner, but the label on it says it contains toluene and acetone. I have little hope for that, acetone is real good at removing colour from stamps. Oh well, still something to try if I get that far down the list looking for a way to get uncooperative stamps off paper.

I have a faint memory in the back of my head somewhere that says xylene is another candidate for removing self-adhesive gum. I've seen that at Home Depot, but only in a 1 gallon can, which is way more than I need to buy right now. Isopropyl alcohol too, maybe - no idea about toxicity with these other solvents, though. Maybe even WD-40! I used to use that to remove the goo from contingency decals back in my racing days for those decals that wouldn't come off very well with Varsol. I would think that would stain the stamp paper, though.

For now I'm having luck with paint thinner / mineral spirits - it has the best combination of cost, safety, ease of purchase and effectiveness, and I don't need to worry about the few uncooperative stamps until I come across enough of them to do more testing on the other possibilities.

Ryan