Advice Regarding Stamp Hinges

Cal - Truth is they wanted a per diem. Tried to convince them that it was for the greater good, but they were having none of it.

Just reading this thread.

For what it's worth, I did my own "investigation" of stamp hinges a couple years ago to see if there were any really good modern hinges. I bought a packet of every brand at the time along with more than a few older brands. I ended up with somewhere between 20-25 brands of stamp hinges, if I recall correctly. To test them, I applied a line or two of each brand of hinge to album paper and let them sit for about a week.

One thing I hadn't expected was the different colors the modern hinges came in. All were glassine paper with gum on them, but the colors ranged from moderately clear beige to almost white to light green with various shades in between. I assume this is the result of the paper used to make the hinges rather than the adhesive because both sides of the hinges were the same color. The adhesives did not appear to be coloring the gum side of the hinge in any way. From that, it seemed to me that whoever the actual hinge-maker is was producing different batches of hinges for different brands perhaps to their specifications by using different glassine paper. Or maybe they just make hinges using whatever glassine paper they have on hand? I remember that older hinges by Fold-O and Dennison and others also varied in color, for what that's worth.

As for the sizes of hinges, years ago some hinges were a good deal larger than others, but all these hinges were the same size. Unlike older hinges, all modern hinges are the same size. Except for the different shades of beige, off-white, and greyish green, all the hinges all looked pretty much the same.

That's also because all the modern hinges are folded. I don't believe any modern hinges come without the fold. Hinges used to come either folded or flat. If there's a modern maker of unfolded hinges, I'm not familiar with them.

As for their adhesive quality and how easy they were to remove from the album pages, there was one very clear result for every brand of modern hinge: the adhesive worked very well to hold the hinges on the page, but they were all very difficult to remove from the paper.

They were so bad that every single brand left a very visible amount of adhesive behind, and every single brand removed some paper from the album pages, often producing a very noticeable thin in the page. All the hinges were far too aggressive to remove from album pages -- and would presumably also be too aggressive to remove from the backs of stamps.. Not a single hinge came off the page easily or left no glue residue behind. I tried a second and a third time, using much less moisture each time, but I got the very same result -- ripping the album page paper when I removed them.

Clearly, using modern hinges will hold your stamps on the page just fine. But good luck removing them. You're very likely to damage both the album and the stamp when you do that.

From this you can draw your own conclusions. What I felt this suggested pretty strongly is that either all modern hinge manufacturers use the same kind of adhesive as well as similar paper -- or that all modern hinges are made by the same manufacturer. Since I'd heard the claim the Prinz makes all modern hinges, the latter seemed to make sense.

I'm certainly not claiming this "proves" that, but it certainly does not disprove it, either, and it does make it seem somewhat likely. Had hinges been different sizes, some unfolded and some folded, some peeling off the album pages more easily than others, and so on, I'd have a different opinion, of course.

This has rather moved away from the original question, but just to emphasise two points: vintage hinges are very rarely offered in the UK; and purchasing similar from US ebay sellers would cost over £30 per packet. This is not a practical proposition for most people.

My advice is to avoid them. How could they be archival?

Why do they need to be?

Drew's post is most informative. Allow me to draw my own conclusion from what he found in his study. Due to the "throwaway" nature of stamp hinges Prinz uses discounted odd lot glassine material rather than first run such as used in interleaving and envelopes. It makes sense given that it is cut into small pieces, licked or otherwise moistened and unceremoniously hidden behind another object while waiting to be removed (in theory) at some point and disposed of. The adhesive is a different story because it is the "performance" component of the assembly for better or worse.

PS: I firmly believe that the different states of repose that collectors observe in different modern hinge brand lots is due entirely to storage conditions.

Speculation is fun but no one should be taking anything definitive away from this thread. Anecdotes aren't the singular of data.

No one knows exactly how old the modern hinges they own are, there are no lot numbers or date codes on them. Even if you purchased them this week, you do not know how long they were in the supply chain or when they were actually manufactured.

So for all anyone here knows, there could be running changes in the production that correspond with various component material usages (i.e. glassine, adhesives, etc.) and the process itself. Perhaps the guy who ran the machine quit last month and this month the new guy runs them differently. But without manufactured date codes or Lot numbers on the hinge packages we have no idea how consistent packages of hinges are to one another.

It is a low value commodity, so they might not make much effort to make them highly consistent over time. They could simply buy whatever raw materials are available to meet their production schedule. Or they could be buying what is on sale. Or they could be buying material from a salesperson who bought them lunch last month.
Don

The team mission is back on.

The email address I used to contact Prinz for years is no longer good. I have not been able to find any contact info on Prinz since. My closest contact is their representative in England and they have not responded to my inquiries in the past. Dauwalders of Salisbury.