Terry Reedy wrote :
On 6/4/2012 8:46 PM, Pierre COURTIADE wrote:
Is there any specialist of Australia on rcsd (since Rodney now
appears quite rarely here) ?

Give us non-experts a try for some questions.

After nearly 10 years beeing in possession of a box of about 8,000
stamps from Australia, I recently decided to begin sorting them.

I noticed these 2 cancels, quite similar :
https://picasaweb.google.com/Courtia...eat=directlink

Do you think it is a hand made cancel or that this mark was produced
by a mechanical stamping device ?

The 2012 June American Philatelist has an article on using scanners
and photo maniputation to investigate questions like this. However,
from the enlargements, I am pretty sure these are two different
cancel stamps. The reason comes from looking at the upper edge of the
upper left - lower right diagonal on both stamps. On the left stamp,
the two edges line up. On the right stamp, they definitely do not.
This would be true even with rotation. Also, the crossing angles are
different (more even on the right).

When the image is shrunk to life size, they look like they could have
been carved from a wine bottle cork.

This reminds me of the "killer" cancels on the earlier US stamps.

Did they use bottle corks? I never really thought about it.

tjr


Hello Terry,

Many thanks for your help : at first sight I had not noticed those
differences between the two cancels.

Now that you put your finger on them it is obvious that they are not
coming from the same cancel.

I do not know if they used cork cancels in Australia.

I will ask on more Oz specialised fora like
www.stampboards.com or www.stampcommunity.org

If I get an answer I will post it here.

--
All the best,
Pierre