Is card washing akin to falsely coloring coins?
david1025
Posts: 41
I have been doing research and I cant believe people would even thing of soaking seventy year old cards in water. My integrity tells me this is as bad a say cutting cards. Is it done frequently? I actually can see it when your holding a card worth $3500 mint but looks like a psa 3 at best. I wont do it because like I said I do not want nor need bad karma cheating people out of their good money but out of the three years of cards I have gotten im only 10-15 cards short on the 1941 playball cards. They range in condition so i know my grandfather didnt do it but if I buy these i dont want to buy these cards for hundreds only to have worthless cards. So what do I look for to see if its been washed? I cant help but think there has to be some way to determin bnut like I said earlier I'm a coin guy and now am starting to learn the card game. Any help would be greatly wanted. The three years are like 30-40 1938 and Maybe a hundred or so 1939. According to help i got here earlier i have all the money cards listed except three and conditions range from psa 1 to 8 or 9 (great looking cards to me). I figure any card worth over $100 i will get graded thru PSA.
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If I read you right, you have most of a set of 1941 playball cards that you got from your grandfather, and you have some 1938 and 1939 playball cards. You're thinking about collecting sets of these cards and don't want to get burned by buying altered cards.
Good news is I think other than possibly the most valuable cards there shouldn't be many counterfeit cards.
I have never soaked a card but have read posts by people who have. They usually soaked them to remove glue and paper residue. I don't know that it's possible to make a card look mint by soaking it. The kids back then would sometimes glue the cards into a scrapbook (cards were valueless toys then) and the glue they used can be dissolved by soaking them in distilled water.
I believe that soaking a prewar card in distilled water to remove glue leaves no evidence, so you probably won't be able to tell if it was done or not, and PSA or SGC might also miss a soaked card.
If you can get a good lighted loupe or a scanner that will scan cards in high resolution, you should be able to tell a reprint from an original, and a trimmed card from an original. I think that should be more of a concern to you than a soaked card. Reprints of vintage cards are all over, and usually they're artificially aged or damaged to make them more convincing. Trimmed cards are unfortunately all over the place also.
If you have a good loupe or scanner PM me and I'll explain the difference in the way they look under magnification. Unfortunately that won't help you much when looking at a card on ebay or at a show.
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Ralph
<< <i>I take my time and double check my posts to be sure my grammer is correct and I don't mispill anything.
Me two. I hate it when people use the wrong words or words that sound like others and accept us to understand. I think we all knead to take are thyme.
Sam
Ive soaked about 1500-2000 cards in last 25+ years. Its the best way to remove them... period!
All are from 1880-1940, but most are from the Victorian Era (1880-90s) and cards found in Victorian Tradecard Scrapbooks (mostly nonsport).
Many Victorian Scrapbooks had glue that was basically a paste made from a mixture of flour and water... these are so easy
Water (soaking) is the only way to remove many of these cards. The older the glue the easier. Most lithographed cards (ie tradecards, T, E, D, etc.) will show no damage at all from the water, but some do show slight staining especially if the backing page was colored. Dont soak real photo cards like T200, T222, N172, N173, N175, etc.. You need to know your cards first before trying to soak them (what type of paper ink etc.). Its always best to test a lower valued card first.
Another very easy soak is the Sanella (German) cards from 1932, they are very easy too with some type of water soluble paste. They actually slid off the paper just like a decal.
Dont knock it until you try it.
If you are talking about restoring color by "Bleaching" or recoloring... thats a far different story as that is actually tampering with the card (water leave no residue). Be wary of bright colored (bright white bordered) E145 cards (Cracker Jacks) as many were bleached back in the 1980s.
Obviously start with a card that doesn't matter to you, maybe a common that you have 2 of.
Leave it there a couple days and see if you had any success.
IF it works, you can't always expect the wrinkle to stay gone.
There used to be some threads on net54 about soaking to remove wrinkles, I've never tried it but some say it works.
I wouldn't be happy with you if I paid a lot for a crease-free joe jackson and then a wrinkle appeared a few months later.