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Europe/Germany : Soaking Modern Germany

 

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michael78651
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13 Jan 2015
01:12:18am
Many of you know that I absolutely detest soaking stamps. However, once or twice a year I do break out the basin and have a soaking session.

A friend in Germany has sent me a couple of envelopes stuffed with modern Germany (2010 to date) on paper. How well do these self-adhesives soak?
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Jansimon
Members Picture


13 Jan 2015
03:52:29am

Auctions - Approvals
re: Soaking Modern Germany

During my latest soaking effort I did a couple of modern Germany self adhesives as well, and had no problem whatsoever with these, in contrast to those from Italy (problematic, but with some extra care they came off undamaged), Great Britain (destroyed a few rather new high values and then stopped) and USA (I thought I had sorted them all out, but accidentally a few ended up in the hot water tub: nothing happened...)

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TuskenRaider
Members Picture


13 Jan 2015
11:35:47am
re: Soaking Modern Germany

Hi Everyone;


So here is an original thought. Why not contact the people who print the stamps in the
first place. Who else would know more about this sticky goo. I worked with adhesive
labels in manufacturing and they were labeled as the acrylic family of pressure sensi-
tive adhesives. However that may not be what the printers are using.

Their machinery, die-cutting knives, rollers and other mechanical parts must eventually
become sticky with this material and need periodic and regular cleaning. Presses cost
upwards to millions of dollars and must be well taken care of to work well. So you can
be sure that they have address these issues long ago.

One thing I learned as a non-degreed Manufacturing Engineer was this. I may not have
the book smarts to know everything about anything, but I do have excellent problem
solving skills. If I have a problem involving chemicals I go ask a chemist the answer.
Always know when to admit "I may not have the answer, but I know someone who
maybe does. Your boss doesn't need to know where you got the answer, just that
you solved his problem! Hey boss where's my bonus? Rolling On The Floor Laughing

If your route is to contact the printers, ask to speak to the Manufacturing Engineer,
otherwise you'll end up connected to a sales people, who may not be very knowledge-
able on this stuff. He will either have your solution or refer you to their chemist or other
engineers.

Good Luck with your quest....
TuskenRaider

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michael78651
Members Picture


13 Jan 2015
12:03:53pm
re: Soaking Modern Germany

Jan, thanks.

Ken, I won't go through the expense, major hassles and such of using all those chemicals to try to remove self-adhesive stamps from paper, and then go through the baby powder or other type of treatment to get the residual adhesive off the stamp. That madness makes no sense to me.

If a stamp won't soak off paper and I want to put it in my album, I will trim the paper as close to the stamp as possible without damaging the stamp, put the stamp in a mount and place it in my album. It would be the same as if the stamp were mint and I placed it with the backing paper into a mount and placed that in my album. No difference in thickness, or anything else except that one stamp is used and the other mint.

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TuskenRaider
Members Picture


13 Jan 2015
12:43:46pm
re: Soaking Modern Germany

Hi Everyone;

@ Michael;

I agree 100%. I have no interest in solving this troublesome problem, however, I thought
that if someone else would like to try, then contacting the experts and picking their brain
would work better. I don't collect anything newer than 1970s-1981 and treat all self sticks
as duplicates and sell them on paper.

Also if there is a solvent solution that the printers use, then it is probably very safe to use.
Worker safety standards in Europe are stricter than here in the states, at least I have been
told that they are.

Keep on soakin'....
TuskenRaider

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michael78651
Members Picture


26 Feb 2015
02:22:22am
re: Soaking Modern Germany

I have taken the plunge, so-to-speak, and soaked about 100 German stamps. The stamps ranged in years from the 1970s to date with most of the stamps from the 2000s. I had a 100% success rate getting all of the stamps off paper.

I started with a bowl of cold water. The older stamps soaked off the paper with ease. The newer, self-adhesive stamps had some trouble. I circulate the water as I soak so that the water remains as clear as possible. I don't want the water as it turns brown from the dissolving gum and dirt to stain the stamps.

To try to get the self-adhesive stamps to come off the paper, I refilled the bowl with luke-warm water. This helped the smaller self-adhesives come free from the paper, but the larger commemoratives remained stuck on the paper. I then drained and replenished the water using a water with a hotter temperature, but not hot. That did the trick as the gum on the self adhesives loosened. On most of the self-adhesives, the gum dissolved. However, on some of the newest, the gum did not dissolve. Instead, it pulled off of the stamp and remained on the envelope paper. Sometimes a piece of the gum stayed on the stamp. I was able to use my finger to rub it off the back of the stamp similar to rubbing off a ball of rubber cement. No stamp was damaged during this process. Just have to have a delicate touch with the wet stamps. The stamps are dry now, and there is no gum residue on any stamp.

In conclusion, if you are soaking the newest German stamps (2010 to date), you will need to use warmer water than what is usually used for soaking stamps. If you don't the glue will not come free from the stamps, at least not in what I consider to be a reasonable amount of time. The earliest self-adhesive stamps can be soaked off paper by using luke-warm water, but some take a long time to soak off. Using the hotter water speeds up the process for these as well.


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TuskenRaider
Members Picture


26 Feb 2015
05:24:54pm
re: Soaking Modern Germany

Hi Everyone;

Thanks for all those detailed tips Michael, and I'm sure they will help a bunch of us
struggling with these things.

Keepin warm....
TuskenRaider

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philatelia
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APS #156650

27 Feb 2015
10:40:13am
re: Soaking Modern Germany

I've had excellent luck soaking most modern material using a very WARM almost HOT water that has a TINY amount of orange citrus cleaner added - seems to help with the gum residue. I soak about 50-100 stamps in a batch using tubs about the size of those plastic wash basins you get in a hospital.

For Water activated gum, most are off in minutes. I leave the self adhesives in the water about 10 minutes before attempting to peel them off the back. I have a second tub of COLD rinse water in the adjacent sink - they all go in the rinse for a minute or so before placing them on a desert magic drying book to press dry. I blot excess water off the drying page with dishtowels.
I soak USA with red ink cancels in cold water as those tend to run or fade.

All colored papers are separated. I only soak issues that I KNOW will soak after testing samples. Recent USA do NOT soak, neither do the very recent Irish SOAR or animal definitives. I'm very careful soaking multiples or stamps with attached selvage or perfed souvenir sheets as the stamps might separate. I don't have any problems with Canadian, Australian, IOM or Channel Islands self adhesives.

The recent Japan that have foil in the paper such as the constellations issues do tend to crinkle if soaked so I started leaving those on paper. You can get them off the paper, but the fronts of the stamps will have a fractured appearance. I haven't soaked any other countries recently.

A tip - I always leave the emptied drying books open in the sun or under a ceiling fan for a few hours to dry thoroughly and to prevent them from getting moldy.

That said, one of my favorite collecting times is taking the nicely soaked and flattened stamps out of the drying books and getting to add those lovelies to my collection. Very satisfying!!!

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"Just one more small collection, hun, really! LoL "
michael78651
Members Picture


27 Feb 2015
12:20:25pm
re: Soaking Modern Germany

"I always leave the emptied drying books open in the sun or under a ceiling fan for a few hours to dry thoroughly and to prevent them from getting moldy. "



In Texas, in the summer, you only need to leave to books out for a few minutes. Happy

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lrmead

06 Jan 2021
11:55:59am
re: Soaking Modern Germany

For any modern stamp try "Citrus spray: Orange" in a spray can obtainable
from, say, Wallmart etc. Works like a charm and will not disturb gum.
LRM

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okstamps
Members Picture


06 Jan 2021
10:46:30pm
re: Soaking Modern Germany

I just avoided soaking self-adhesives the past ten years or so. Then in the last couple of years I started working with self-adhesive stamps from different countries. Some were relatively easy to soak, others were difficult to nearly impossible. I tried using a citrus solvent product that my local Wal-Mart carried but with very mixed and somewhat disappointing results. I had read in numerous articles about using products with "d-limonene" solvent in them, such as one carried by Target (no local Target store). So I went the Amazon route and did a search for "d-limonene". Found a source for a 0.7 quart bottle (665 mL) of the pure d-limonene for about $20.

The pure d-limonene works wonders on every self-adhesive stamp that I have tried it on. I just experimented with some US stamps which I had separated into water-soakable and non-water-soakable using the Scott catalog to let me know which was which. I tried soaking the water-soakable stamps and had a difficult to nearly impossible task removing the paper from the stamps. I got a couple off OK, but also damaged some of them. So I took the rest out of the water and let them dry overnight. Today I hit them with the d-limonene and in just two or three minutes I had no difficulty in removing the paper from the stamps. Much quicker and less of a hassle than the water soaking route. No damaged stamps. I then just dust the back of the stamp with some talc powder to remove any residual stickiness and I am finished.

The d-limonene also works well on German stamps.

I tried the d-limonene on some British stamps a while back. It even took these very difficult-to-remove-from-paper stamps off of the paper without a hassle. One small stamp with the oval cut-outs was even removed with the cut-outs still intact.

I just place the stamps to be removed from their paper face-down on a cloth, brush the d-limonene onto the paper with an artist's brush, and then wait a couple of minutes. I then fold the paper back from a corner of the stamp to give me something to grab a hold of, and then slowly peel the stamp from the paper. The stamp is then set face down on a hard surface and left alone for a couple days to allow the residual d-limonene to evaporate from the stamp. Then I dust the back with talc powder to remove any residual stickiness and I am finished.

The stamps that I have treated in this fashion over a year ago and then placed in a stock book have not had any tendency to stick to any of the surfaces in the stock book.

So from now on all self-adhesive stamps that I come across are going to get this treatment. It is just so much quicker for me than trying to use water.

A number of years ago I purchased a number of mixtures of used USA stamps off of paper from various sources on ebay. Quite a number of the "water-soakable" self-adhesives in the mixtures had damage on the back of stamps caused from the person soaking the stamps trying to rub the remaining self-adhesive from the back of the stamp after removal from the paper. Others have small patches of remaining adhesive clinging to either the back or front edge of the stamp. I am in the process of selling these stamps on HipStamp and all stamps with damaged paper surfaces on the back or having the residual sticky glue get tossed into my junk bin.

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jmh67
Members Picture


07 Jan 2021
05:59:28am
re: Soaking Modern Germany

In my experience, warm water does the trick for almost all German self adhesives except for the first few (the four Landmarks definitives that came in booklets, and haven't got the water soluble layer between paper and adhesive). For them it's about fifty-fifty, and lighter fuel or citrus oil may do a better job while it would be wasted on the others.

Italian, French, Russian, newer UK stamps etc. are different cases, and there are a few modern German commemoratives with water-activated gum printed in fugitive inks!

-jmh

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HockeyNut
Members Picture


07 Jan 2021
06:30:52am
re: Soaking Modern Germany

"In my experience, warm water does the trick for almost all German self adhesives except for the first few (the four Landmarks definitives that came in booklets, and haven't got the water soluble layer between paper and adhesive). For them it's about fifty-fifty, and lighter fuel or citrus oil may do a better job while it would be wasted on the others."



Indeed.
No trouble for stamps from Germany.
The only problem is that it takes a little longer for the stamps to be off the paper.
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Author/Postings
Members Picture
michael78651

13 Jan 2015
01:12:18am

Many of you know that I absolutely detest soaking stamps. However, once or twice a year I do break out the basin and have a soaking session.

A friend in Germany has sent me a couple of envelopes stuffed with modern Germany (2010 to date) on paper. How well do these self-adhesives soak?

Like
Login to Like
this post

www.hipstamp.com/sto ...
Members Picture
Jansimon

13 Jan 2015
03:52:29am

Auctions - Approvals

re: Soaking Modern Germany

During my latest soaking effort I did a couple of modern Germany self adhesives as well, and had no problem whatsoever with these, in contrast to those from Italy (problematic, but with some extra care they came off undamaged), Great Britain (destroyed a few rather new high values and then stopped) and USA (I thought I had sorted them all out, but accidentally a few ended up in the hot water tub: nothing happened...)

Like
Login to Like
this post

www.pagowirense.nl/s ...
Members Picture
TuskenRaider

13 Jan 2015
11:35:47am

re: Soaking Modern Germany

Hi Everyone;


So here is an original thought. Why not contact the people who print the stamps in the
first place. Who else would know more about this sticky goo. I worked with adhesive
labels in manufacturing and they were labeled as the acrylic family of pressure sensi-
tive adhesives. However that may not be what the printers are using.

Their machinery, die-cutting knives, rollers and other mechanical parts must eventually
become sticky with this material and need periodic and regular cleaning. Presses cost
upwards to millions of dollars and must be well taken care of to work well. So you can
be sure that they have address these issues long ago.

One thing I learned as a non-degreed Manufacturing Engineer was this. I may not have
the book smarts to know everything about anything, but I do have excellent problem
solving skills. If I have a problem involving chemicals I go ask a chemist the answer.
Always know when to admit "I may not have the answer, but I know someone who
maybe does. Your boss doesn't need to know where you got the answer, just that
you solved his problem! Hey boss where's my bonus? Rolling On The Floor Laughing

If your route is to contact the printers, ask to speak to the Manufacturing Engineer,
otherwise you'll end up connected to a sales people, who may not be very knowledge-
able on this stuff. He will either have your solution or refer you to their chemist or other
engineers.

Good Luck with your quest....
TuskenRaider

Like 
1 Member
likes this post.
Login to Like.

www.webstore.com/sto ...
Members Picture
michael78651

13 Jan 2015
12:03:53pm

re: Soaking Modern Germany

Jan, thanks.

Ken, I won't go through the expense, major hassles and such of using all those chemicals to try to remove self-adhesive stamps from paper, and then go through the baby powder or other type of treatment to get the residual adhesive off the stamp. That madness makes no sense to me.

If a stamp won't soak off paper and I want to put it in my album, I will trim the paper as close to the stamp as possible without damaging the stamp, put the stamp in a mount and place it in my album. It would be the same as if the stamp were mint and I placed it with the backing paper into a mount and placed that in my album. No difference in thickness, or anything else except that one stamp is used and the other mint.

Like 
3 Members
like this post.
Login to Like.

www.hipstamp.com/sto ...
Members Picture
TuskenRaider

13 Jan 2015
12:43:46pm

re: Soaking Modern Germany

Hi Everyone;

@ Michael;

I agree 100%. I have no interest in solving this troublesome problem, however, I thought
that if someone else would like to try, then contacting the experts and picking their brain
would work better. I don't collect anything newer than 1970s-1981 and treat all self sticks
as duplicates and sell them on paper.

Also if there is a solvent solution that the printers use, then it is probably very safe to use.
Worker safety standards in Europe are stricter than here in the states, at least I have been
told that they are.

Keep on soakin'....
TuskenRaider

Like
Login to Like
this post

www.webstore.com/sto ...
Members Picture
michael78651

26 Feb 2015
02:22:22am

re: Soaking Modern Germany

I have taken the plunge, so-to-speak, and soaked about 100 German stamps. The stamps ranged in years from the 1970s to date with most of the stamps from the 2000s. I had a 100% success rate getting all of the stamps off paper.

I started with a bowl of cold water. The older stamps soaked off the paper with ease. The newer, self-adhesive stamps had some trouble. I circulate the water as I soak so that the water remains as clear as possible. I don't want the water as it turns brown from the dissolving gum and dirt to stain the stamps.

To try to get the self-adhesive stamps to come off the paper, I refilled the bowl with luke-warm water. This helped the smaller self-adhesives come free from the paper, but the larger commemoratives remained stuck on the paper. I then drained and replenished the water using a water with a hotter temperature, but not hot. That did the trick as the gum on the self adhesives loosened. On most of the self-adhesives, the gum dissolved. However, on some of the newest, the gum did not dissolve. Instead, it pulled off of the stamp and remained on the envelope paper. Sometimes a piece of the gum stayed on the stamp. I was able to use my finger to rub it off the back of the stamp similar to rubbing off a ball of rubber cement. No stamp was damaged during this process. Just have to have a delicate touch with the wet stamps. The stamps are dry now, and there is no gum residue on any stamp.

In conclusion, if you are soaking the newest German stamps (2010 to date), you will need to use warmer water than what is usually used for soaking stamps. If you don't the glue will not come free from the stamps, at least not in what I consider to be a reasonable amount of time. The earliest self-adhesive stamps can be soaked off paper by using luke-warm water, but some take a long time to soak off. Using the hotter water speeds up the process for these as well.


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TuskenRaider

26 Feb 2015
05:24:54pm

re: Soaking Modern Germany

Hi Everyone;

Thanks for all those detailed tips Michael, and I'm sure they will help a bunch of us
struggling with these things.

Keepin warm....
TuskenRaider

Like
Login to Like
this post

www.webstore.com/sto ...
Members Picture
philatelia

APS #156650
27 Feb 2015
10:40:13am

re: Soaking Modern Germany

I've had excellent luck soaking most modern material using a very WARM almost HOT water that has a TINY amount of orange citrus cleaner added - seems to help with the gum residue. I soak about 50-100 stamps in a batch using tubs about the size of those plastic wash basins you get in a hospital.

For Water activated gum, most are off in minutes. I leave the self adhesives in the water about 10 minutes before attempting to peel them off the back. I have a second tub of COLD rinse water in the adjacent sink - they all go in the rinse for a minute or so before placing them on a desert magic drying book to press dry. I blot excess water off the drying page with dishtowels.
I soak USA with red ink cancels in cold water as those tend to run or fade.

All colored papers are separated. I only soak issues that I KNOW will soak after testing samples. Recent USA do NOT soak, neither do the very recent Irish SOAR or animal definitives. I'm very careful soaking multiples or stamps with attached selvage or perfed souvenir sheets as the stamps might separate. I don't have any problems with Canadian, Australian, IOM or Channel Islands self adhesives.

The recent Japan that have foil in the paper such as the constellations issues do tend to crinkle if soaked so I started leaving those on paper. You can get them off the paper, but the fronts of the stamps will have a fractured appearance. I haven't soaked any other countries recently.

A tip - I always leave the emptied drying books open in the sun or under a ceiling fan for a few hours to dry thoroughly and to prevent them from getting moldy.

That said, one of my favorite collecting times is taking the nicely soaked and flattened stamps out of the drying books and getting to add those lovelies to my collection. Very satisfying!!!

Like
Login to Like
this post

"Just one more small collection, hun, really! LoL "
Members Picture
michael78651

27 Feb 2015
12:20:25pm

re: Soaking Modern Germany

"I always leave the emptied drying books open in the sun or under a ceiling fan for a few hours to dry thoroughly and to prevent them from getting moldy. "



In Texas, in the summer, you only need to leave to books out for a few minutes. Happy

Like 
1 Member
likes this post.
Login to Like.

www.hipstamp.com/sto ...
lrmead

06 Jan 2021
11:55:59am

re: Soaking Modern Germany

For any modern stamp try "Citrus spray: Orange" in a spray can obtainable
from, say, Wallmart etc. Works like a charm and will not disturb gum.
LRM

Like
Login to Like
this post
Members Picture
okstamps

06 Jan 2021
10:46:30pm

re: Soaking Modern Germany

I just avoided soaking self-adhesives the past ten years or so. Then in the last couple of years I started working with self-adhesive stamps from different countries. Some were relatively easy to soak, others were difficult to nearly impossible. I tried using a citrus solvent product that my local Wal-Mart carried but with very mixed and somewhat disappointing results. I had read in numerous articles about using products with "d-limonene" solvent in them, such as one carried by Target (no local Target store). So I went the Amazon route and did a search for "d-limonene". Found a source for a 0.7 quart bottle (665 mL) of the pure d-limonene for about $20.

The pure d-limonene works wonders on every self-adhesive stamp that I have tried it on. I just experimented with some US stamps which I had separated into water-soakable and non-water-soakable using the Scott catalog to let me know which was which. I tried soaking the water-soakable stamps and had a difficult to nearly impossible task removing the paper from the stamps. I got a couple off OK, but also damaged some of them. So I took the rest out of the water and let them dry overnight. Today I hit them with the d-limonene and in just two or three minutes I had no difficulty in removing the paper from the stamps. Much quicker and less of a hassle than the water soaking route. No damaged stamps. I then just dust the back of the stamp with some talc powder to remove any residual stickiness and I am finished.

The d-limonene also works well on German stamps.

I tried the d-limonene on some British stamps a while back. It even took these very difficult-to-remove-from-paper stamps off of the paper without a hassle. One small stamp with the oval cut-outs was even removed with the cut-outs still intact.

I just place the stamps to be removed from their paper face-down on a cloth, brush the d-limonene onto the paper with an artist's brush, and then wait a couple of minutes. I then fold the paper back from a corner of the stamp to give me something to grab a hold of, and then slowly peel the stamp from the paper. The stamp is then set face down on a hard surface and left alone for a couple days to allow the residual d-limonene to evaporate from the stamp. Then I dust the back with talc powder to remove any residual stickiness and I am finished.

The stamps that I have treated in this fashion over a year ago and then placed in a stock book have not had any tendency to stick to any of the surfaces in the stock book.

So from now on all self-adhesive stamps that I come across are going to get this treatment. It is just so much quicker for me than trying to use water.

A number of years ago I purchased a number of mixtures of used USA stamps off of paper from various sources on ebay. Quite a number of the "water-soakable" self-adhesives in the mixtures had damage on the back of stamps caused from the person soaking the stamps trying to rub the remaining self-adhesive from the back of the stamp after removal from the paper. Others have small patches of remaining adhesive clinging to either the back or front edge of the stamp. I am in the process of selling these stamps on HipStamp and all stamps with damaged paper surfaces on the back or having the residual sticky glue get tossed into my junk bin.

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Members Picture
jmh67

07 Jan 2021
05:59:28am

re: Soaking Modern Germany

In my experience, warm water does the trick for almost all German self adhesives except for the first few (the four Landmarks definitives that came in booklets, and haven't got the water soluble layer between paper and adhesive). For them it's about fifty-fifty, and lighter fuel or citrus oil may do a better job while it would be wasted on the others.

Italian, French, Russian, newer UK stamps etc. are different cases, and there are a few modern German commemoratives with water-activated gum printed in fugitive inks!

-jmh

Like 
1 Member
likes this post.
Login to Like.
Members Picture
HockeyNut

07 Jan 2021
06:30:52am

re: Soaking Modern Germany

"In my experience, warm water does the trick for almost all German self adhesives except for the first few (the four Landmarks definitives that came in booklets, and haven't got the water soluble layer between paper and adhesive). For them it's about fifty-fifty, and lighter fuel or citrus oil may do a better job while it would be wasted on the others."



Indeed.
No trouble for stamps from Germany.
The only problem is that it takes a little longer for the stamps to be off the paper.
Like
Login to Like
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