What Did You Do Philatelically: Today Or Recently?

Following a prompt on this forum, I recently downloaded a copy of the 'Basic Machin' document. A friend of mine also recently acquired a new printer, so I prevailed upon his good nature and he printed out the 31 pages for me, in colour.

Over the weekend, I have been going through my stockbooks and pulling out as many different GB Machins as I could find, and started mounting the best of them in their place. Sadly, I have more gaps than I'd hoped for initially, but still have a couple of boxes of loose stamps to check for some of those elusive higher values.

Being somewhat colourblind makes identification of the various shades and colours quite problematic in parts, but luckily I'm not looking to create a 'specialist' Machin collection - the '101' level is good enough for me for now. The differences in perforations (with/without ellipsis) makes things slightly easier, and I still need to properly identify the different types of printing: photo, engraved, embossed etc.

All in all though, an interesting exercise, and as I say, still more to do with this classic stamp design.

That's some good project imperfectal.

I am trying to specialise in Machin. For this I use the Deegam handbook which gives 3 levels of collection, depending on how deep you want to go.

As you already mount your Machins on pages, you have done much more than me I just began the sorting .

Brave man Imperfecta. I tried collecting machins to the level of the SG concise catalogue. Ie only about 800 different up to 2019 I had two carrier bags of machins on paper plus presentation packs and a while later I got a stock book of regional machins that included 3 specimens of thr very rare Welsh 0.5p.It took me weeks to sort out 200 different by printing method or colour. some colours I just cannot identify or differentiate which is which. at the end of about 40 hours work I was able to mount most specimens fg GB penny and halfpenny ( pron. haypnee) I suspect I will die with the album no further forward and bulging stock books and a collection of booklet sheets as a reference to what the colours are.I find identifying Machins can sometime be as much fun as pulling out your own teeth.
What have I done recently? I showed some of my USA collection to a neighbouring society. I discovered there are probaby only 3 collectors of US stamps in the north of England and as Newbie US collector I was showing my collection to the two others!

Silhat - "I am trying to specialise in Machin." - I could never specialise to that level, due to the aforementioned colour blindness. Shades would be totally beyond me!

Most of my collecting is restricted to the SG Simplified level because of this.

Deegam, with very few exceptions, does not list shades for the Machins. Connoisseur listed shades.

Colour shades are hard for me too, not as bad as you, but still hard.

I struggle with direction of printing (DOP) and some esoteric luminescence variation : how can someone tell « this is a 4.5 mm phosphor band type A and this is a 4.0 mm type A2 »? Seriously ? You are in the dark, holding your UV light, trying not to harm your eyes, then you hold the graduated lense… my multitasking skill is too low for that.

Moreover, I mostly collect used stamps. So the gum variations are out of reach for me.

Anyway, enough rupbling, those sorting are really a fun thing to do.

To start with, 'your uv light' may not work for Machins. You need a longwave and a shortwave uv lamp.

There exists one that allows you to switch from longwave to shortwave but it is like a household appliance that chills the milk, boils your water for a cuppa, vacuums your house and feeds the dog: when you no longer get a hot brew, your dog dies, because on the blink means everything is on the blink.

Have a longwave lamp and a shortwave lamp. Those will help identifying A and A2 phosphors.

Hello NSK,

I have a dual UV lamp (254 and 365 nm). A professional one that I repaired. I got it from the chemical laboratory where I work as it was no longer in use.

For A/A2 phosphor, I thought that the difference was that the A2 gives an afterglow with longwave UV. Am I wrong ?

I still find it quite difficult, but it will certainly be easier with practice, as to find the DOP (I use a 20x achromatic lens for this).

I think I need to get some references (stamp which a with no doubt of the type I search) to compare.

On some older Machins (especially used) the tagging is dead and you spot by residual film that contained the taggant. I always check using both sw and lw. I ignore minor shades unless a second difference.

Deegam puts perf varieties in lowest tier while most put it at top level. I did learn that the value settings is almost useless in helping identifying variants. Hans confirmed this after I was getting variances not mentioned.

I started with adminware intermediate pages but excluded many of the sources unless there was some other characteristic, I also ignore gum types.

Picked up a few worldwide classic stamps from the latest APS sales circuit to cross my desk. Here are some of them.

Robert

imperfectal's comments on distinguishing colors got me to wondering if there was a color measuring gadget. I looked on internet and saw several but the prices were more than I felt like paying. $100 $200 $500, and much higher. I'd rather spend $ on old stamps, so I checked for apps instead of gadgets. There are several! I read descriptions of some of them and ended up trying out 4 of them. Two I didn't like and two others I did like.

I checked the apps by measuring colors on several postage stamps, and entered the color app's numbers into Excel and compared the color of the spreadsheet's resulting 'color chip' with the color of the part of a stamp that I'm measuring.

Of course, how well I can accomplish this depends on two light source items. One is whether the app has a color balance feature (show the app a white paper, and click its white-balance button). If the app doesn't have that feature, I have a gooseneck floor lamp with a 6500K (pure white) LED bulb in it that I can shine on the stamps.

One of the apps seemed to think that all the stamp colors I tested were much darker than they really were (after I typed in the app's colors into Excel, the color chip was too dark, so I rejected that app. Another app seemed good, but it output percent numbers instead of the usual RGB or HSL that Excel wants to use, so I had to reject that one.

The other two apps passed my test with various colors along the spectrum. The apps indicated the small area that they were measuring, and when I held my phone camera near the stamp, the measuring area was small, around 4mm in diameter so I could easily measure the color of a small part of a stamp.

According to the Wiki article on color blindness, about 8% of males have the common red-green color blindness. There are about 7 different kinds of color blindness.

Lightly, once you have the color info, which I assume is based on various saturations of RGB, how to you equate that digital info into a catalog number/color description?

On the topic above relating to Machins, I have seen 2 different references to "Collecting 101;" Deegam (which I don't own) and Machin Nut. Are these listings identical? Does Machin Nut list more shades than Deegam?

Shermae : I think the Deegam numbering is specific to this publication. I don't have the Machin nut.

If you look after, for exemple, the 1d pre-decimal, it's only color in Deegam is yellow ochre. In level 3, you will find some note indicating « shade ». It gives 4 level 2 stamps (DG PD 2.1 to 2.4), 11, level 3 stamps (DG PD 2.1.1, etc.) and more variant. It classify stamps by face value : DG 100 would be any machin with face value of 10p (level 1). It become DG 100.x at level 2, then DG 100.x.x at lvl 3.

The Connoisseur catalogue gives 3 colors shade (olive, dull olive and yellow olive) and I think 6 « main » numbers (like O1, O25). And it classify stamps by sets O2 being the 2d brown.

This is the Machin Nut:

https://adminware.ca/machin/