1c 1851 Plate 1-Late Stamps

I would suggest starting in the Stampsmarter website, under the tab Features you will find the 1c Plating Initiative feature. Open it up and explore it as you did the Neinken book. That should be a very good start. Watch sales of these stamps and use them as a challenge of sorts to try plating them. Some people list the plating position in their listing. Ignore it at first, delve into plating it yourself and then compare to what that say in the listing. Soon you will begin to notice listings of stamps, say on ebay, where you will disagree with the listing designation, say they are calling the stamp a Scott #7 and it's really a 9. Then you will know you are on your way. Just keep plugging away. You will need to explore uses of your computer to save, enlarge and tweek the listing photos to help you see the finer details. Use other websites in the process also. You will see them listed in forum discussions. Explore them too. Good luck!!

Hi Mac. Your post made my day. Its nice to see you here.

There is no substitute for reading the text in the Neinken book. There is more there than you might think. Read it multiple times. You can pace yourself, and maybe just target one plate at a time, to make it manageable.

I would read all of the introduction and essay-proof stuff first, then maybe first focus on Plate 1-Late, which tends to be the easiest to plate.

When plating -

* learn what the full die design looks like. Its in Neinken - large die proof

* learn what the reliefs look like on the transfer roll(s) for each plate. There are drawings in the book for each roll.

The above, essentially, are your baselines. In plating, you are looking for variances, by position. But variances from what?
Answer - from what should have been there, which is, for Plate 1L, either a Modified T relief, an A relief, or B relief. For the top row right pane, a combination of an Original T relief and a Modified T relief, and a giant mess to go with it.

Once you have a good grasp of what should be there, then you can start looking for uniqueness by position.

Good luck.

caper already mentioned stampsmarter, which is a great resource.

There is also the 1c plating archive, which contains a very accurate plating record.

http://www.slingshotvenus.com/Frank...hv_Main.html

Finally, on this forum, if you search under a thread subject of:
"1c 1851" or "1c 1857" that will reveal most of the by-plate discussion threads that we've had here.

I use the bookmark facility of this forum to effectively go back and forth among them. Its one of the top buttons on the page, under "tools". I bookmark via this forum all of the 1c (and other) pertinent threads I want to remember. That saves later searching.

Caper and Tx... Thanks for the tips. I did go to Stampsmarter and searched out the plating data. I got through chapter 10 (text portion) of Neinken but soon realized I had to go back to near the beginning and read it again. As suggested, too much to take in with one or two readings.

Thanks also for the tip on searching for the threads via the "1851" or "1857" method. Have read through a couple of those.

My first attempt at plating one of my own stamps using the SS site data led me to plate it as 21L1L. When I find out how to post the image I'll do so in order to confirm my findings (or not) by the experts here. Most of my images are bmp and too large for uploading.

Also check out the guide dot charts that I made for some of the imperf plates.

Here is an interesting pair. Positions 97-98R1L is the only horizontal pair that contains a relief B and a relief A. Both are double transfer stamps and sharp impressions. It did not take long to plate this pair with the heavy doubling of 98R1L.

Here is an interesting stamp. It appears to be position 85L1L with rusty plate. A nicely cut (by a blind man) stamp that appears to have been used twice and first cancel was not removed well at all. The odd thing about this stamp is that the heavy rust mottling in "POSTAGE" is not shown on other copies that I have seen and not noted in Neinken's drawing or shown on Doporto's copy. But the other marks are clear and the marks on bottom right for position 86L1L look good.

This appears to be 8L1L. Very few plating marks, but with only 1 guide dot at upper right and not double recut at bottom, will narrow it down to 4-5-8L1L.

You might want to check Plate 2. I'm not really seeing much evidence of a recut there.

Sinclair, I think you are correct. There is a better match on plate 2 with 7L2. I am not sure why I got stuck with this being a plate 1 late.

What is your opinion about the one above that one regarding the heavy rust or mottling through the letters?

jaxom, 85L1L looks correct for that stamp above. The effect in the top lettering could be a one-off overinking for that particular sheet.

I would call it stray ink too.

This one has decent centering and appears to be 57L1L. The relief A stamps are a bit harder to plate without guide dots. It does seem to have all the markings though for this position.

Agreed, 57L1L.

Thanks Dudley. I always prefer a second opinion before I post it in the database.