Question - Why Different Size Date Cancel On 1989 USA Commerical Cover?

I was looking at one of my covers of my fledgling automobile/motorcycle manufacturer/dealership cover collection and I thought the double cancellation on the cover was interesting.

Both cancellations are from the same day (Dec 23 1989 PM) - but the circular date stamps are radically different sizes. Why is this? Is this normal? Was Cleveland testing or transitioning from one brand of canceling machine to another and my cover just happened to go through both of them?

Thank you


PS: If you have any automobile/motorcycle manufacturer/dealership covers laying around you don't want. Let me know.

Mostly likely a postal worker(s) screwed up and accidentally put it through a second or different cancellation machine.

The large dial pairs with the slogan - a typical 4-head facer-canceler machine showing the two "trail bars" at the left edge of the dial.

The small dial pairs with the wavy lines - an International "flier" style of cancel from a single-head machine, requiring manual facing of the mail.

Most mail would go through the facer-canceler, but at Christmas with increased mail volume, significant mail would me mailed in faced bundles and could easily be run through the Flier with little additional staff work, although examining a pile of several hundred Cleveland Flier cancels shows consistent use throughout the year.

There was no reason for this particular piece to go through both machines. My guess is that the operator of the Flier noticed a significant percent of incorrectly-faced mail when the stack went through the machine - so to save labor, ran it through the facer-canceler to correct the facing problem thus getting a second cancel on your cover.

My question is why is one so much smaller than the other one?

It was cancelled by 2 different machines with different cancelling devices. It made an unnecessary trip through the second machine.

Each make/model of machine tends to have different sized dials, different spacings, different number of killer bars, etc. There is only limited interchangability.

I done a bunch of reading to better understand what you were telling me. One big thing that threw me off I thought international was for international mail, but after a lot of searches I found out it referred to the the company "International Postal Supply" There's always something new to learn. It's amazing you know so much.

Thank you

More questions:

1) Does 4-head mean it cancels 4 envelopes at a time?

2) If I see the trail bars on the left does that mean it was a 4-head canceler?

3) If #2 is yes then: If the dial is large and without the trail bars what would that mean?

Thank you again

To simplify a bit, I'll try a sketch. The facer canceler machine is basically 2 pairs of the same 4 mini units. A random stack of rectangular envelopes will have the stamp in 4 possible positions: facing you at top right or bottom left (up side down, if you will), and the similar 2 stamp positions on the envelopes facing away from you, A, B, C, and D. The envelopes ride along their top/bottom and feed into the canceler which uses the tagging on the stamps to "see" them.



Letters are canceled upside down (which is why machine cancels are the same distance down from the top of the envelopes - they are actually the same distance up from the bottom of the upside down envelope!) The envelopes with stamps on the bottom (B and D)are diverted to the first 2 canceling heads. The remaining stream of envelopes passes through an inverter belt which turns them upside down and the process repeats with A and C now riding along upside down. The tagging is detected and the envelopes diverted at before. The result is 4 stacks of faced and canceled mail ready for the sorting process. The few envelopes with no stamps detected pass on a 5th position for manual inspection by the Nixie Clerks.

Half the stamps passing through the facer-canceler machines will have their stamps on the leading end of the envelope and half will naturally have the stamp on the trailing end. The "trail bars" are effectively extra gripping surfaces in addition to the edge of the dial to pull the envelope through the machinery. 2 of the canceling heads have trail bars, 2 do not.

Here is a pair of photos (crudely overlapped) taken in 1994 of such a system. In this case the letters feed from the far right and pass to the left. The accumulation "tables" of canceled mail stick out toward the viewer. The operators then transfer the accumulated mail into the corrugated trays to carry them off for further processing.



Of course these machines have been replaced by the spray cancel units, but the same principles applies to face the cancel the mail.

Love that picture, John. Talk about organized chaos!

What an elegant solution. Makes me want to be a mechanical engineer! But of course the engineer in me has to ask. What happens if there are stamps in both B and D? How is this resolved? Does it fail and pass it to the next step? Or does it look for a valid address?

Thanks again!

I have a question on another cancellation but will have to scan it in when I get a chance.

As I understand it, these machines looked only for stamps (and meters and FIM bars on Business Reply Mail, I think I remember the term correctly) in order to get the mail faced and canceled. Additional machines then dealt with the address.

For finding stamps in 2 positions: I do not know, but I suspect the machine was programmed to accept the one on the lead edge which it "saw" first. If incorrect, it would be kicked out at a later stage of processing.