Apparently, This Is How Reperforated Stamps Are Made These Days

Kind of a scary tool to potentially be in the hands of someone that maybe has a tilted moral compass.

Jim

https://www.ebay.com/itm/ARTIST-POS...AOSwpHtcgXi9

Oh my! The varieties will be flying hot off the press!

Not much different, I have been informed, than what happened at an international show a few years ago. Apparently they brought in an older pin perf machine for G or OHMS punching demonstration.

Then some people were bringing in full sheets of stamps to get them perfed with the original machine and you guessed it, created expensive varieties. You cannot differentiate because it was the original setup.

FINALLY I can perf all these 1857 1c Franklin imperf sheets I have...

It takes too many 1c stamps to mail a letter, I'm, hoping to perf some of my 1847 imperf 10c sheets.

There are enough of thse gizmos around; I believe the Cartel had or still has something similar. It is then even more important that collectors inform themselves on reperf detection. Machines like this typically make very much cleaner cuts than (say) what is found on older US stamps. There are other points as well, which also need to be learned by example. There are lots of analyses in the SCF archives.

Specialty gauges are available for various collecting areas (for example, US stamps produced by the BE&P.) I would strongly encourage anyone collecting in an area with a specialty perf gauge available to purchase and use them; they make detecting reperfs in the area they cover a breeze.

These gauges measure both perf spacing and the size of perf holes -- if the stamp doesn't gauge exactly, the stamp's been reperfed. The perforating machines the BE&P used produced perf holes the same shape and size every time, within tight tolerances. A reperf job would have to be almost superhumanly accurate to pass a specialty gauge.

As I've mentioned before, though, it's getting easier and easier for fakers to produce custom tools to alter stamps. Between contracting somebody on certain websites to get custom commercial-grade machines built cheaply in China, or 3-D printing (currently 3-D printing at high-enough resolution is very expensive, but the cost is dropping and the quality increasing all of the time) fakers today have better options than a basic comb perforator that almost certainly will not gauge to any real stamps.

Listing has ended. I guess someone bought it.

Even though the seller calls it a comb perforator, it is actually a stroke peforator which makes line perforations. It was probably called a comb perforator because the perforator looks like a comb but it does not make comb perforations. The most popular real pin hole perforations that one can get from Rosback perforators which have been used by the printing trade are large hole line gauge 11.75 (stroke) and small hole line gauge 12.50 (rotary). The U.S. Kiusalas specialty perforation gauge has both on it as 12-67 and 12.5-63

That's crazy. Thanks for sharing.

This would be a great tool for someone who has a modern hobby local post (some examples are NASA Local Post, Doc's Local Post, Shrub Oak Local Post, Cadillac Local Post - well, you get the idea). Get some dry gummed paper, use a machine like this - and there you go. I wish I had one. It is a challenging and fascinating field in the collecting sense (Do you have a Yeti Local Post in your collection?) and lots of fun in the hobby local post sense!

John
River of the Monks Local Post

One of my co-founders of SCADS, Richard Doporto, has created a US Specialty Precision Multi-Gauge, which not only does what the Kiusalas Specialist Gauge did, it has 11 other functions for recognizing grill types, differentiating rotary from flat plate printed stamps, identifying fake Schermack perfs, measuring design and cancel sizes and more. There are detailed downloadable instructions for its use. And all for $15.
http://www.slingshotvenus.com/stamp...tyPerf5.html

He also has many in-depth analyses of US classic fakes with links on that same page, many of which came from my research into ebay stamp fraud in the early 2000s..

In addition to owning the largest plating site for the US 1ct of 1851-57, Richard also does impressive plating certificates for that issue for only $17, using a stereo microscope.
http://www.slingshotvenus.com/Frank...hv_Main.html

In his spare time, he is also a mechanical engineer and long-time member of a rock band, Very bright guy.

Just curious, do the admin in this forum encourage the use of such tools? I may consider buying one to experiment on some of the imperf Washingtons and Franklins.

Penny, are you referring to the perfing tool the post was originally addressing, or to the Multifunction Gauge I recommended in my post, which is just a tool to help identify reperforations?

geokstr, I was referring to the perforator tool posted by Jim.

I never saw that before. Interesting. Thanks for sharing.