My Pre-1920 Coil Pair Project

I've put it off long enough. I posted a few coils back in September asking for an education and I definitely got one. I have about 40 pre-1920 coil pairs that were included in a Lighthouse hingeless album I bought to break down. I've put off working on them because after reading all the comments I realized how hard this was going to be. But it is time to try. I've made myself a spreadsheet and am capturing the correct information for each stamp and I'm determined to go through them all and determine which are good, which are bad, and which I just can't tell. Sending 40 off to get certified doesn't seem like a good plan.

So to start with, I'm capturing the correct:

perf size
stamp measurement
watermark
flat/rotary type

and then I'll go through each and check those by comparison to known good stamps if possible and also evaluate the edges and perfs to confirm they look as they should.

This is going to take some time.

Step 1 and I already have a problem.

On the Stamp Smarter page on detecting faked coils by Bill Weiss he states:

"horizontal coils are 25mm, vertical are 21.5mm. A variance of + or - .03mm is tolerable. Anything more can be discounted as fake 95% of the time"

But on the lighthouse pages different sizes are printed for different issues.

For 1914 single line watermark flat press perf 10s it shows a size of 22mm

For 1916 unwatermarked perf 10s it has 22.5mm

and so on.

So according to Lighthouse each of these coils are expected to have slightly different widths from edge to edge. Some are 21.5, some 22, some 22.5. These are large differences - much larger than allowed by Bill's article.

Can anyone point me to a definitive source for coil widths? My inclination is to believe Lighthouse, but...?

Thanks in advance.

Rick

Here is a pdf someone put together which says all genuine vertical perf coils should be 21mm tall - another opinion which is different from Bill's and from Lighthouse. http://www.hamiltonphilatelic.org/p...mpbasics.pdf

Here is an interesting looking reference. Are there old American Philatelist issues online?

Ken Lawrence, "United States Stamps: Expertizing U.S. Coil Stamps", American
Philatelist, Vol. 112 (March 1998): 222-27, correction at (May 1998): 424

My understanding is there is NO definitive source for coil width. 21.5 mm or 25mm seem to be the consensus for "more likely to be legit coil width". However, there are real flat plate coils that don't reach those measurements. I've heard the idea that any coil that deviates more than 0.5mm (e.g. <21mm or 24.5mm) is ALMOST definitely not real...but that makes me think that there are rare real flat plate coils that may be a hair under those measurements. However, perhaps the more relevant question (just like when discussing expertising imperfs like 315) is:

What is the minimum coil width that would not immediately rule out a good cert? That answer...I don't know, but I would guess it to be in the range of 21mm for vertical coils and 24.5mm for horizontal coils. There are far more experienced and knowledgeable W-F coil philatelists on here. Maybe they can answer your question more definitively.

p.s. I love Wash Franks, including the coils. But I agree they are quite challenging. Welcome to the insanity!

Thanks. I guess the obvious thing to do is to eliminate any stamps that fail on some other sanity test - like perfs too perfect or edges uneven, but frankly my first look at these doesn't eliminate many. It will certainly be an education. I do wonder where the Lighthouse album pages got their measurements from.

Several years ago, in a stamp club meeting, when I told a group of guys that I'd be collecting W/Fs, one of the guys said that I must be masochistic. They are a mine field and I'm still a bit of a novice--still learning. Clark Frazier, on this site, gives good insightful information to help understand these issues. 21.5mm and 25.0mm measurements is generally the starting point to establish "good" from "bad" but not a defining factor in itself.

By the way, I'm wondering if the line in Bill Weiss' article has a typo. It says 21.5mm + or - .03mm. But I saw a similar quote in several places that says 21.5mm + or - .3mm.

I looked at Bill original article and it says .03, but .3 does make more sense. If Clark or someone can verify I will make the change.
Don

If your wallet is fat enough, you could just buy only certified W/F coils. That's a rather expensive route, but it does make good sense for some of the more valuable - and/or often faked - varieties.

Here's an update on this. I've gone through all the more difficult coils now and as everyone probably would have expected almost all the more valuable ones are probably fake. There are 3 that I will bring to the PF to verify just in case, but - unlikely they'll come up with a different conclusion.

I want to give publicity to the Frankenstamps page on Stamp Smarter:
http://www.stampsmarter.com/1847usa/WFFakes.html. This is incredibly helpful in thinking about what might have been done to each stamp to fake it. I have one decent higher value pair - a #446. There is only one option shown on that page for faking it and that gives me more confidence. I will bring that to the PF too for confirmation. That is the only high value I came across that looks legit.

My eyes are blurry, my neck is sore from bending over the stamps. This was not easy.

RS

Returning from vacation...

Unfortunately, some expertizers place too much reliance on coil height or width. The nominal 25 mm height or 21.5 mm width is an average width. While it is true that few coils will exceed the nominal height of 25 mm many will be shorter, keeping in mind that a small amount of paper may be lost in the cutting process.

Hand assembled vertical coils were cut from sheets with 2 mm and 3 mm horizontal spacing between stamps. Cutting wheels were set up to accommodate the differences in width or the outer parts with 3 mm spacing may have been discarded. Perf 8½ and perf 10 flat plate coils were cut from "A" plates with nominally 2.5 mm horizontal spacing resulting in slightly wider vertical coils. Perf 12 single line watermark coils from "A" plates are can be rejected as fakes with a possible exception for auto-wound perf 12 Scott 388, if any can be found.

If the perforations look good, I check to determine if the edges are parallel. Most of the time very narrow margins indicate trimmed perforations which often can be rejected by eye as not having parallel edges. In practical terms, stamps shorter than about 24.5 mm are more likely to be fake, but it should be noted that Scott 355 perf 12 horizontal coil examples run shorter than average, possibly because only a few rolls were produced.

Coil height or width should never be used to accept or reject coil stamps without confirmation. If the perforations are good, the edges must be parallel to a tolerance of about 0.001 inch (0.025 mm) with some exceptions for perf 8½ coil center sheet margin edges or trimmed hand assembled paste up pairs.