Danish Classics, Show Them To Me.

Sorsh, I will give this a try probably this weekend. Right now I am relocating my stamp/hobby room to another, larger, room. This is a big task for me, as I have lot's and lot's of stuff. But I will also wind up with more room to work.

I do have another quick question. I am assuming you do not store your plated items in any pre-printed album. Do you use stock books, stock pages, or stock cards? Also, how do you organize them?

Sorsh - thank you for this most interesting thread. I've not yet started plating the bicolors myself, but your enthusiasm is inspiring. Maybe next time I pick up my Denmark collection. I presume Vario sheets would be ideal for this kind of study.

The 3 øre postmarked on Læsø - WOW, can't be very common from that tiny Island.

@spain

no, I dislike preprinted albums, I make my own.
for platings I use these specially made pages for plating bicolored, we had them specially made for this purpose.



for the dublicates I use a standard 64 page album, it has 10 rows so left side is print 1 right side print 2, and the position 1-10 and so on.



for working with bicolored I use these albums, 1 album for each value 1 page for each print, I plate them in these albums, then when I think I have enough I place my work on the above pages.

Sorsh,

I am lazy when it comes to scanning and posting images.
But I will scan some of my Danish stamps and post them in this thread to verify, how accurately (or inaccurately) I identified them.
Your knowledge may be very helpful.
It may take some time, though.

Sorsh - That is an amazing compilation of the 100ø. I can only imagine how many copies of that stamp you need to look at to achieve that level of completeness.

Those pages are a great idea. I wish companies like Vario would make something similar. I think the largest they have are only 8 rows, which would not work for a plating of 10 rows.

I really like your system and may adopt something similar when I start getting familiar with what I am doing.

On separating the frame types 4 & 5, is the link below a good general guide to follow, for a beginner?

http://www.frimindeks.dk/Denmark/bi...70-1905.html

I will post some scans later tonight of the stamps I have determined are frame type 4. Also a few observations I made in sorting the type 4's and 5's.

I think I've found a new obsession.

I'm just as impressed as spain_1850. And in addition to the level of completeness, most specimens have very nice postmarks as well. Truly a pleasure to look at. Very well done Sorsh

thanks all for the compliments, and Blaamand you're right about the nice postmarks. 100øre is one of the more expensive things to plate an average price at around $10 per stamp and upwards depending on the postmark, I recently bought one with a rare cancel in norway actually :)

since 100øre where mainly used for packages, they where often used in strips or blocks. and since the rules where that each stamp had to have a cancellation, and cancellations where larger than a stamp - most 100øre would have 1 main cancel, and 2-3 edges of other cancels. for packages containing money or other values, it was not allowed to use strips, each stamp had to be placed apart from the next. and each have a cancel... the 2 ring cancels where used for this in copenhagen. and the normal cancels in other towns.

so to get 100øre with a single town postmark that is not copenhagen isn't that easy.

100øre is my big passion, and outside the postal museum there is no other complete plate of 100øre. 2 of the 3 positions i'm missing I need help, or extreme luck. I know people who have them, but i'm not satisfied with the quality of their stamps.
the last one is a thick frame which is often on auctions - i'll buy that when it's the last i'm missing.

@Spain.
i look forward to seeing more of your stamps... to the page you found, i'd have to say it's horrible.... when I get my book back from a friend i'll take a picture of the illustrations in that.
meanwhile, the thing to look for in frametype 4 is the lower left "feather".. it shows on your page, but not the enhanced picture.. and anything that does not look like that isn't that important to begin with.

statistics : in order to reach 99.9% completion of any print you'd have to look at 2000 stamps... of course due to the internet, and good quality pictures on auctions I can often plate before I buy... I think I only have about 300 from print 1, so i'm far from those 2000 stamps.

Wow! That's a lot of copies of the 100ø.

I though I had a lot of copies of the 16ø to study, but nothing like those amounts!

Below are scans of all of my copies of the 16ø, perf 14 x 13.5, with what I believe are frame type 4. I separated out the ones I think are type 5, and put them away for now.

This brings me to my first observation. It appears that the majority of these are going to be either type 4 or 5. I did find 3 (pictured last), that don't seem to fit in type 4 or 5, so I am assuming these are the 2 most common frame types for this issue?

These are my type 4's (I hope) with normal frame.




These are with inverted frames. I inverted the scan so the frame is oriented as a normal frame.





These are the 3 that do not seem to fit in as a type 4 or 5.



Another observation: This type of cancel appears on type 5's, but I didn't see any on the type 4's. Is this because the cancel device was implemented later than the type 4 frames? If so, that seems like a good clue when looking at stamps on places like eby. If you are looking for type 4 frames, then you should be able to avoid stamps with this cancel on them, is this correct?


All thoughts appreciated, and now where should I go from here?

Spain... you've achieved a 100% accuracy on the maingroup 4.. every single one of those are correct.

the 3 stamps you have troubles with are in order, print 3 thick inverted frame. print 3 thick inverted frame and print 4. the thich frame are maingroup 1. print 4 is maingroup 3.

you're also way ahead of most people who start to plate... cancels are important to notice.

the ring cancels with a number in the middle were taking out of service 1. april 1884 (with a few exceptions, but these are rare) so if a stamp has that cancel it's very certain before that date. same goes for the 2 ring cancel.

the cancel that caught your eye is a so called Bridge cancel, and these started 1891... so all emissions from before this date are likely to have the normal "lapidar" circle cancel.
BUT not as certain as the number cancels, because stamps from before that date could have "wintered" and used years later.

the bicolored øre values were in use from 1874 to 1905 so a very long periode, and you didn't just throw out a stamp.. so it's a general clue, but not a definate proof.

the stamp you have is maingroup 5 though... the higher the "øre" value is, the more likely the stamp is to have survived in a drawer for use years later.
the pay pr hour in 1880 was 27øre so 16øre wasn't just something your threw in the trash :)

i suggest you start with the last stamp " the inverted from maingroup 4) it has a huge ovalflaw over D in denmark, it also have a frameflaw, so you can plate this stamp easily.
once you have established the print, you can look at the rest of the inverted ones.. since 4 of those 7 are from the same print... and i've also spotted a few more plate and oval flaws.. these would get you started.

Ok, I'm probably going to be confused a bit for a while, but bear with me.
I'm still unclear as to how I figure out which print these are from. I understand the frame types (a bit), but how do you know which print these are? I know there is probably an easy way to figure it out with Tofdata, I just don't know it yet.

Let's take the one you suggested:



Already established is the fact that it is an inverted frame type 4.
So then I went to Tofdata, not knowing which print this is, and just started scrolling position by position, stating with print 1, position 1.

I got lucky and found the ovalflaw (1.40), over the D, in position 8. Then I noticed the list of all the prints for this denomination to the left, and according to what I am interpreting, this ovalflaw can be found in 12 of the 17 prints, but in various plate positions?

Then I also noticed 3 prints have an arrow (pointing south) next to them - print 12, 13, & 14. So I took a guess that this referred to inverted frames. I go to print 12, position 41, and find OF 1.40 pictured. There is also a frameflaw (RF 28.60) shown and I remembered you spotted one. I looked on my copy again and I'm pretty sure mine has the same OF 28.60, yes? But it is also the same for print 13, position 41, so(?).

I'll take a stab in the dark and say it is either print 12, pos. 41 or print 13, pos. 41. How would I know? Maybe the shade or color of the frame?

This is an excellent learning excercise for anyone interested - thanks to both of you for sharing - please keep it rolling!

i'm a teacher for a living, so I should somehow be able to teach you to do this :)

ok, we go back to the beginning - first - you've discovered something that could be an ovalflaw.. the white spot over D... we know it's 16øre maingroup 4 inverted frame.

in time you'll learn which maingroups are used for which prints, but that doesn't concern us right now, we need to know if this is an ovalflaw that is registered (16øre is really well covered) so to do this we open tofdata.

type in 16ø in the value (Værdi) and it tells us there are prints 1 to 33.
Press F7 to get to ovals/frames... if it shows frames first, then press O, and R when you need frames.

(this is ovalseries 1 that shows because the selection was print 1 to 33, if you had selected print 22-28 ovalseries 2 would have appeared.)

now you can use arrow left and right to change between these ovals until you find an ovalflaw that looks like yours.

on page 6 of 9 we find one that looks exactly like yours.. it's referred to as ovalflaw 1.40

we do not yet know which print it is... so back to F3.

we can now in OF type in 1.40 we also know it's an inverted frame, so under R/O we can type O for omvendt (danish word for inverted)
and press enter... we then get a result like this.



and unfortunately the ovalflaw in print 12 and 13 are both in the same position (not common this happens).

we now press F6 to get the prints. if the selection is still print 1-33 you'll land in print 1, press T then type 12 to go to print 12. press P for position and type 41

and it'll look like this



it shows the stamp should have a little dot in the SW part, and your stamp also has that, so at least now we know that it can't be print 14.
but is it print 12 or 13?

in theory you should write 16øre print 12/13 position 41 frameflaw 28.60 ovalflaw 1.40 and leave it for now, you have 3 other stamps that look like this one in oval and frame color, all of which are maingroup 4 and inverted.. so likely to be from the same print.

if you plate those, you'll know which print the one you, for now, can't determine completely.

explaination of the numbers.
1.40 stands for "ovalseries 1 flaw 40 (it's just numbers given to them by Lasse Nielsen, usually due to it being the 40th ovalflaw discovered by others over the last 140years)

28.60 refers to the clichéposition (60) that's confusing since this is position 41, but the frame is inverted and if you turn it 180degrees position 41 is now position 60.
28 stands for "setting 28" everytime the frames are put together in a different way than before we call it a new setting.. so this series of different values who use this setting is called the 106 series (referring to the HUGE frame dent I showed earlier).. so 106 series setting 28.

all this will make alot more sense later on

I need help with the TOF401.DAT & TOF401.EXE. OK ; I downloaded the two programs.I open TOF401.EXE and I have the black screen. I type in say Sk2 and I can't seem to figure out where too go from there.I'm not sure of which keys activate what.

perf12 - Not sure if it matters but it looks like you may have an old version of the program. If you go to the link below you will find, on the right hand side of the page, a link to a newer version, which is TOF704. Maybe that is the issue.

http://phpbb.tofarvet.dk/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=52

when you open tofdata exe, 2 windows open one is the actual program and the other is a background program for the database... very old programming was used to make it, and we're trying to pressure Lasse Nielsen to give up his database to implement in a more modern language, but he's reluctant to do so.

as we speak a guy is making a new program entirely from scratch, it's a gigantic project to draw all these flaws, so it'll be a long time till it's complete.

so, if you only have a black screen, you've closed the actual tofdata screen, and not the black. when the black screen is open, you can't relaunch tofdata so always close both screens.

i haven't experienced problems with version of windows or similar.

also as Spain mentioned, you have a very ancient version.. get the latest.