What is the best way to remove two collectable stamps that are stuck together without hurting the value.?

Question

I have a collection that was a gift to me. Some of the stamps are stuck together. Block of four to another block of four. It seems that they were stored in a environment with allot of humidity and the sticky side stuck to the face of the second set. All of the stuck stamps have never been used and were placed in a waxed envelope for many years.

I want to seperate them without damage and decreasing the value of this collection.

Also I am open to NOT seperating them if my goals are not met. Any ideas???

Answer 1

Store them as is!!!

If you have really rare stamps it better to use professional dealer's or collector's help in this area. Even glue condition make sense for value of stamp.

Answer 2

I use an airtight food container, put a bit of water in it, add a small plate or other raised above the water surface, put wax paper on that, and then the stamps. I seal the container with the air tight lid and carefully set it aside away from sunlight or any direct or indirect heat source. After several days, I carefully open the container and separate the stamps. This re-introduces moisture into the stamps, softening the gum, and allows for undamaged separation of the stamps. (most of the time).

Answer 3

Almost sounds like this is the only pig you have. As a pig grows, so does the size of the rooting. One large pig, one large mess, even to the point of uprooting the fence post which contains him. A loose pig can be a pain to get back in. We once chased a younger pig for 4 days before we caught it. Unless this is a pet pot bellied pig, I would leave the ring in. The ring it has doesn't really hurt for normal trough feeding, it when the pig pushs hard soil, it's applying a much stronger pressure. Are you raising this pig for food? They gain faster on fed grains than they do digging for roots to eat. The ring is a teaching tool, by now your pig has learned not to apply the strong pressure that causes pain. If you still insist on removing it, some rings have a screw & hinge system, remove the screw, it opens. Others you need to snip the ring entirely through, which also can be painful to the pig as you are applying the pressure of snipping.

Answer 4

A Sticky Situation

A stamp must be affixed to a letter in order to serve its intended purpose. To accomplish this, the vast majority of stamps are gummed. Some stamps, like the ones the Dutch sent to their Asian and West Indian colonies, were sold and sent without gum. In the nineteenth century, a long boat trip to a hot climate in a humid hull meant that gummed stamps would arrive stuck together and had to be soaked in water to separate them, thereby losing their gum anyway. Sometimes the stamps were gummed upon arrival in the colony; though in India, the first issue was never gummed. The Danish West Indies (the American Virgin Islands after they were sold to the United States) issued the same stamp two ways over the years; either gummed in Denmark or gummed locally.

The gum on most early stamps posed a problem for early stamp producers. In the United States, newspaper editorials routinely complained that the stamps would not stick when moistened and that the taste of the gum was objectionable. The government was in a bind. To make the gum stickier would have meant having to apply it more thickly, which besides raising production costs would have caused the sheets of stamps to curl even more than they were already prone to do. Gum was applied wet to the printed sheets of stamps and, as it dried, it contracted, forcing the sheets into tight little rolls. Modern gumming avoids this by “breaking” the gum as it is placed on the stamp. Breaking occurs immediately after gumming, with the paper being pulled in the opposite direction from the curl, setting up small ridges or lines that, ideally, keep the stamps from curling. This method dates from early in the twentieth century. The stamps that the newspaper publishers complained about were kept from curling by hanging them to dry in sheets with weights attached at the bottom-- a method that prevented curling only as long as the weights were on.

Gum is a major problem for stamp collectors, too. Many old stamps-- such as the first issues of Denmark-- have gum that just doesn’t want to come off. It has cracked and solidified over the years until it has a consistency similar to plaster. Some gums contain sulfur, like the gum used on Germany’s 1936 Ostropa souvenir sheet (a specially prepared issue for philatelists that had postal validity as well), which reacts with water vapor in the air to produce minute amounts of sulfuric acid. The acid is too weak to harm a collector’s hands, but sheets that have not had the gum removed have now mostly disintegrated. Until about 1890, gum was of such poor quality that collectors routinely washed it off. In the last eighty years, however, collectors have reversed their previous aversion to gum with such vigor that it seems almost as if they are atoning for earlier sins. Pendulums swing; although we will be talking a lot more about gum, it would be wise to remember that gum is just one attribute of a stamp in mint condition.



I am not sure if this will help in your situation but I hope so I would check with some antique dealers before trying it to determin if it will effect the worth of the stamps.
I hope this helped.

You might want to try steam to it works on envelopes and seems to me it wouldn't cause as much damage as soaking them.

Answer 5

I suggest removing them from eachother the same way stamps are removed from envelopes. As a kid we always put the paper in water and waited. The glue from the stamp would soften and it would lift off of the paper. The stamps should separate from eachother the same exact way.

Once the stamp lifted we would remove them from the water with tweezers and lay them on a sheet of waxed paper to dry. Once dry we would place them in waxed paper envelopes or mount them with stamp hinges into a book.

Soaking them in water and removing the adhesive will not decrease their value. They are not post marked.

Answer 6

If you have a vaporizer, like Vicks Vaporizer for instance, you can wait and let the machine start sending out steam and hold the stamps in front of the steam to get them moist and soft enough to gradually pull them apart as the steam melts or moistens the glue. But as you are pulling them apart keep them in the steam so it can help moisten them so you can pull them apart, but you have to let the hot steam help you do it. Try this and this should help, maybe the face of the others will be ok but TAKE YOUR TIME AND DO NOT FORCE OR MAKE IT COME APART, GIVE IT TIME TO HELP YOU.

Answer 7

This has worked for me -- Put the stuck stamps in the freezer for a day (not touching anything wet or frosty, of course). This usually makes them get unstuck without any damage.

Answer 8

it depends on what stamps you are talking about - if they are fairly valuable like 2 blocks of $2.60 Graf Zepplins stuck to each other by all means take them to a professional, if they are just worth a dollar or something try some of the methods listed here

Answer 9

i don't know if this would hurt it, but i've always removed stamps by soaking them in some water and then letting it drying after separating them

Answer 10

try holding them above a steaming pot of water and being very gentle. If it was me though id leave them together just to be on the safe side.