Stamp Mounts Material

I like using stamp mounts with the clear front.

Does anyone know the material they use to make the mounts with.

I tried searching the internet for the material showgaurd uses. I wouldn't mind buying a few sheets of the clear material to try and make my own mounts.

Hawid mounts are made from polystyrene- quote from website "Material: 100% polystyrene (free from chemical softener, acid, stabilisers)". I presume Showguard use similar. Suppliers to railway modellers sell sheets of the stuff.

You won't save any money making your own buying scale model supplies, and the results are certain to be terrible. If you want to try, get .01" thick back and clear "Evergreen"-brand polystyrene sheets.You'll need to use some kind of custom hot iron to weld them together. Glue won't do it, and scale modeling cement will melt everything giving you a pile of goo. Capillary action will suck the thin-type cement into irregular shapes instead of a neat line. The thick tube-type will have a similar problem, but be even harder to control. CA glue will similarly not work due to capillary action, and will also fog the clear plastic. If you somehow manage to get two layers of thin polystyrene sheets connected in any way that resembles a stamp mount, you'll need to cut them precisely - metal straight edge and a scalpel and/or a stamp mount cutter depending on the size. I know this because my other hobby is building scale model airplanes.

The Evergreen sheets are 0.25mm thick compared with the Hawid at 0.16mm.

https://goscf.com/t/74314

It may seem a simple task but trying to make your own mounts is akin to making your own car tires. It won't go well and that's why nobody does it.

Thanks, there has to be a way. My thought is how do the companies make them so perfect, what equipment do they use. There has to be a way to duplicate it.

They use industrial equipment, and there appears to be less than 10 versions of this equiment in the entire world (maybe less than 5).

Hello123,

Just buy Hawid (or any of the other mount brands). I personally use Hawid for all my mounting.

As has been discussed on SCF many times, the chemicals used in these processes are not kind to the human body.

Absolutely do not follow the path from the member who wanted to use MEK to make his own mounts.

You won't save any money at all and you will not be happy with the results.

This not a problem looking for a solution - the solution is commercially available mounts.

Save your frustration for IDing watermarks or shades or 1/4 perf measurements or whatever your personal collecting poison is

This question has been asked before:
https://goscf.com/t/76410

Once you've mastered homemade mounts you can tackle homemade hinges. From an article in American Philatelist August 2011 ():

Polyethylene is the material used to make Showgard etc…..

Yes, Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET), which is more rigid than Polyethylene (Polythene). I was getting bloomin' confused, myself, then I found an Alibaba listing for the stuff. Minimum order 500 kilograms, main buyers Moldova, Oman and the USA

I hardly have the time or energy to mount with hinges let alone make my own mounts! I use Hawid clear strips and a little Showgard cutter. I'm thinking of building a WW collection in Minkus Supremes with my duplicates just using hinges because of time restraints. I've been spending too much time looking for the albums!

I have nothing to add to "making your own mounts" except to echo those who say don't bother. It will take endless amounts of time to produce sadly inferior mounts that will not work well and may damage your stamps. Not exactly a recipe for success.

As for K7prz's comment about using hinges in Minkus Global albums, in any two-sided page album you pretty much have to use hinges, not mounts. You can try using mounts, but it will quickly bulge the album out massively and require many more binders to spread out the pages. The thickness of a stamp in a mount is probably 3-4 times the stamp's normal thickness. Both the large Minkus Globals and the Scott Internationals use two-sided pages and were designed for stamp hinges and pretty much require them to work well by keeping the pages reasonably thin enough. Stamp mounts work well and make stamps look elegant on one-side pages.

Interleaving pages makes double-sided pages work with hinges or mounts. The new Scott-sold version of the International comes with interleaving. Binders are a minor expense at this point, the mounts cost much much more, but in the Scott International I think they look a lot better. I would question having enough room for mounts in a Minkus, but I haven't tried, just taken stamps out of one.

I wish I had enough all different stamps to make an album bulge without mounts. Since I buy new foreign issues at times, I guess I might---but I don't buy the supplements to house them. And I'm not going to hinge new mint foreign stamps. They sit in a box in glassines.

I do not mount most modern material but they will usually go onto a Vario page along with my Steiner pages with the country. There are some pages from Lindner? that are light colored but outrageously expensive.