Soaking Stamps

Approximately how many stamps do you soak at a time? Also do you enjoy soaking stamps?

As many as you are comfortable with, and yes, when I am in the mood.

I also have to be in the mood, but, once into it, I don't mind it at all.

I usually soak about 2-300 at a time, sometimes more.

Chimo

Bujutsu

wow Bujutsu . What do you soak them in? A Bath tub? :)

When I soak I usually soak the same as Bujutsu. Just in a small bowl and 20 to 30 at a time. After the 20 to 30 I change the water and soak another 20 to 30 till I am done. I place them all on a section of newspaper to dry for an hour or so. While they are still a little damp then I put them on between 2 pieces blotter or chipboard and press them under a couple of catalogs for a day or two. By then they are dry and flat.

vacuum man that is the exact same thing I do. Only I use some boards to keep them flat and the second step after newspaper is paper towels. After about three uses. I throw the newspapers away and the paper towels and start out
with clean newspapers and paper towels.

Next time I soak which will be very soon. I think I'm going to try some dish soap in the soaking water to see if it will clean the stamps up a little bit.

My experience with dish liquid, while limited, was that that the paper lost a bit of its hardness. I had a large lot of 3 cent green US bank note stamps which had apparently been stored in in attic for many years in a locale where extensive amounts of coal was burned. It took several washings with dish liquid to remove the coal dust. The stamps looked good after the final wash with clear water, but the paper seemed to be a bit limp.

I wouldn't recommend dish liquid unless the stamps are really dirty leaving no alternative.

Clark

A wee bit of hand soap under the tap while water running in for your first soak is all it takes. Never used dish soap - I would assume there are grease cutting chemicals and who-knows-what in there.

Thanks for the advice guys. I was hoping someone would chime in.

I soak enough to fill a couple of pages in my drying book, then set books on top of the drying book. Flat as a pancake. (You know, a pancake isn't really that flat).

By using soap I assume this is some sort of hand soap? Won't the soap stay in the paper after the stamp dries? If so, any harm in this?


-IBFS

chloramine-T, it's an anti-foxing paper bleach. 2-3 drops per bowl is enough to spark up your stamps, rinse the stamps thoroughly. Got mine in a stamp shop so the industry recommends it.

More info here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloramine-T

It kind of depends on the kind of stamps for me. If it's a "premium" lot, say one ounce of a specific country, all different stamps, that I paid a fair amount of money for, I'm a bit slower and more careful than the process I'll describe below, which is how I attack kiloware by the pound when there are a lot of duplicates.

I like to buy kiloware by the pound (or more) and first I usually go through and cherry pick what looks most interesting and soak those first and separately. This, incidentally, is why I buy in bigger lots. My thought (which could easily be wrong) is that a 5 pound lot is less likely to have already been cherry picked than a quarter pound or an ounce. Anyway, I soak enough to fill an 8.5"x11" 6-page drying book completely , cover-to-cover, at maximum capacity per page. Toward this end I sort by size and figure out how many stamps I can fit on a page, then count that many out. For jumbo commemoratives, it's usually 25 per page, 150 stamps total. For small sized definitives, it's usually around 80 per page, 480 total. Medium sized commems are usually 40 or 42 per page, etc. If it's a mixed-size lot, I usually estimate or weigh them out. If they're really closely trimmed, about 2.5 oz comes pretty close to filling the book. If they're not as closely trimmed, I adjust accordingly. Again, the goal being to fill the book completely but have no stamps left over.

I use very warm water in a relatively small 3-gallon or so bowl, and I get every stamp off the paper and into a second warm-water rinse bowl before I put any in the drying book. I then rinse them further under gentle warm running water for a bit, taking care to make sure the stamps don't get damaged by swirling water. Then I proceed to grab a pile of them at a time, which works *very* well. Extra water squeezes right out of them, and since they're all the same size, I can just put them down in rows one after another, and usually the top stamp will just stick to my thumb as I move it across the pile; it;s a very fast process. I then take a dry kitchen towel, lay it over the page of wet stamps, and run over the towel with a rolling pin to soak up any extra moisture before turning the page.

In this way, from the time I put my hands into the water, I can fill up a drying book completely in 35 minutes or so if they're all jumbo sized, closer to an hour or so if I have to do 500 or so small ones. That's "hands-in-the-water" time, soaking time adds a bit more to the total time, of course. I don't stack weights on the drying book, as I find the stamps dry faster if the books aren't weighted down - weighting them down traps the moisture. And they're usually almost completely dry in 24 hours or less, at which point I put them in several large glassines, leaving them open so they can air dry for a bit, at which point I close the envelopes and then weight them down with a couple Scott Catalogs on top of them for a few days. I have 3 drying books and when I'm going through a big lot, I'll usually do 1-2 soaks like that per day until they're done. The books can be used again almost as soon as they're emptied. I put them in front of a fan for a bit, standing up and fanned out. The blotter paper gets completely dry pretty quickly and the book is ready to be filled again.

TheArtfulHinger That is quite a process but it sounds like a good way to soak and dry mass amounts of stamps. I'm sure after doing this a few times you probably get it down what seems to be a natural routine.
Thanks for the detailed response.