Danish Classics, Show Them To Me.

Sorsh,Spain 1850; Thanks: it works now.

Well, apparently my version of TOFDATA was a little old as well. I had 7.02, so I upgraded to the 7.04.

Sorsh, I must say, your step by step makes it much clearer, although I am sure it will take a bit to be able to find my away around with any proficiency.

So, I did get that one correct, but I think I did it on accident, or at least took a longer way to figure it out.

Now, taking your instructions I looked at a second one. Here are my results. Let me know if I have it correct.


16ø
print - 13
pos - 57
RF/FF - 28.44
OF - 1.49

that is absolutely accurate... and now, which print was the last one?

Well, if the frame color has that much to do with it, I'd say it is also print 13.

I tried another:

Frame type 4F
print - 14
pos - 71
RF/FF - 28.30
OF - 1.55


And one more:

Frame type 4U
print - 12
pos - 17
RF/FF - 28.84
OF - 1.90

yes, the first one was print 13, so if you did as I suggested and typed print 12/13 you can delete 12 and be positive it's print 13.

your plating of print 14 pos 71 is correct.. but not the last one.

when you're shuffling through the pages, and you find a flaw that looks like yours, you have to make sure the other idenfications are there as well.

that brings me to another tool we have at our disposal... in the postal museum alot of sheets of many different prints have been preserved.

so when you think you have a print 12 position 17 you can compare it with the sheet at the postal museum (we have 600DPI scans of all the sheets) and these are available for download. if you did this you'd see that not all the characteristics are on your stamp.

the last stamp is print 13 position 74.

so now you've got the hang of it, and you'll continue to make lots and lots of mistakes. it's a learning curve that for some people takes many years to master.

the most difficult thing to master is to use the perforation to determine the vertical row.
the stamps you've shown are all KIII perforation (K stands for combperforation "III" is reffered to as the 3rd machine put into service.) and KIII perforation is almost identical on all rows so nothing can be determined on these besides that the print you plate it to be must have "takning" (perforation) KIII listed.



and heres a cutout of the fullsheet from the postal museum of print 13 pos 74 so you can compare.

OK, I see that now. Truthfully, I am not sure where I even got those numbers from. Maybe my eyes were tired (excuse #1)? Looking back at what I had the flaws are nowhere close. Thank you for the correction.

I actually found that site, with the complete sheets, but it seemed ike it was way too far beyond me at the time, that I didn't pay much attention to it. Now that I have my foot in the door, I'll bet that some of it makes some sense to me, especially using Google's webpage translation feature.

Another observation: A clean scanner bed is your friend!
While general stamp scanning is OK when there are dust particles on the scanner bed, scanning these stamps for "flyspecking" is NOT good. I think that might be part of my initial frustration. small dust particles are masking themselves as flaws.

I am also noticing that postmarks seem to have a way of hiding the flaws as well.

yes postmarks aren't always our friend. and everyone who plates will have stamps sitting in albums that can't be plated either because it has no flaws at all, which is typical for perforation 12 3/4. or because a postmark covers the flaws.

when I find a stamp I can't plate, I note down what i've found (if anything), and I put it away and look at in some other time. because maybe next time you'll see something that seems obvious but your eyes were fixed on something else.

one of the best bicolor platers there are out there is actually german, and he had a stamp sitting for 6 years before I finally figured it out.

what I would recommend you do is get more 16øres, typically you can get them in sound quality for around $1 each on danish auctions. a plated 12 or 16øre would typically cost you somewhere between $2 and $10 depending on how visible the frame/ovalflaw is.

if you want I can keep an eye out for you?

Don't want to let this thread scroll too far.

Yes, that would be great if you could keep an eye out. I have a couple sources myself, and now that I have a small amount of plating knowledge, I can look at stamps closer and weed out ones I don't really need, saving some money.

Today I got curious and opened up an envelope of the 8ø, with inverted frame. These happened to be frame type 5. But I thought I would see if I could plate one anyway. I found one with a rather large oval flaw in the outer ring.

I then used the F7 key to find the oval flaw number. I immediately noticed there are many more "oval series" to look through. But I think I managed to find mine in oval series 5, and the OF number should be 5.53.

But when I go to F3 and input the information and hit enter, nothing comes up, only 3 stars. Do I need more knowledge, or more information to input? Or am I just doing something wrong, which would not surprise me.

I also notice there are 121 prints for the 8ø, which seems like a huge task.

BTW, I now have 16 plated copies of the 16ø. I even made a plating diagram, using a common spreadsheet program, to keep track of each print I have copies for.

Here is the 8ø.

first, this 8øre is maingroup 4 and since inverted maingroup would be "isolated inverted" in most prints (1 inverted and 99 normal frames, or the other way around.) they are always worth a look.
print 54 and 55 are 99 inverted and one isolated normal frame (position A31) - this stamp is from print 55 position B81.

you found the right ovalflaw, but i'd imagine you had to start from ovalseries 1 and go through them all till you got to ovalseries 5 and found 5.53 - right?

imagine if you found a frameflaw and did the same, you'd be skipping through sheets of frame flaws for hours and could end up not finding it... 2-3 attempts like this you'll be in the corner of the room banging your head in the wall while eating woodchips :)

you have to go about it differently, first you need to be absolutely confident with maingroups before attempting 4-8øres. then you need a table of the prints from maingroup 3 (print 1-11) maingroup 4 (print 12 to 55) maingroup 5 (perf 14) (print 56 to 79)... and narrow down your searches as much as possible.

if I find a table like this i'll post a picture... I know them all by heart by now so never bothered with such a table.

back to your stamp..

the ovalflaw reappears in ovalseries 7.



the word genganger fra 5.53 means reappearance of 5.53.

this ovalflaw 7.79 is also present in print 54 (pos B19, but the perforation does match vertical row 9, and the frameflaws aren't present.

so that's the reason you got 3 stars in your search...

8øre inverted maingroup 4.. always start your search in print 54/55... and they're NOT easy to plate - worn clichés so flaws might not be present and you get alot of randow little dots or flaws that aren't consistant.
these prints do offer some huge frame- and ovalflaws and these are of course easy to do.

i don't think I can use private messages on this forum yet.
is it allowed to exchange email adresses here?

I'm understanding that posting emails is not allowed here because of the possibility of robot hacking.
I am also not sure about how many posts need to be made before you can use the private email system The only thing I can find in the rules is that you can't be a "new member". I am just not sure when you stop being a "new member".

On to the stamp:
I see a couple things I did wrong.
First - I assumed it was maingroup 5, not 4.
Second - You are right about the oval series. I just started going through them starting with 1. But, I stopped when I got to series 5 because I thought I found what I was looking for. I didn't figure there were 2 similar flaws with differing OF numbers. These things I'll learn.

I think I'm going to make myself a Danish to English philatelic glossary of common terms that are used on that program. Some I'm starting to remember, but other I might not see as often.

50 posts is the minimum required to email each other.
Great thread!

littleriverphil - Thanks!

Sorsh - I think you're good for private emailing

Tried sending you an e-mail Spain...
Did it work?

No, I did not get one. But I noticed the email address I have on file here is an old, out of date, one. I just updated it, so go ahead and try again.