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