Card Evaluation before sending in for grading
 

Does anyone here use any program or template to judge centering prior to shipping cards in for grading?

If so, can you share what methods you use to do this?

I used to have 'The Judge" which was a plastic template you could drop a card into and you could see at a quick glance how the centering was. I was a bit leery using it, while there were cutouts for the card to drop into, there was no corner protection.

I just came across a template called 'Original Grademaster Card Grading/Centering Tool' and figured I'd give it a try to see how it works.

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance.

Not sure what you mean. Your personal standard won't come into play when submitting the card.

The older tool he's talking about if it's the one I was thinking about had a recess for the card, and a sort of ruler around the outside of that to measure the borders.

The newer one is a clear plastic overlay with a sort of similar ruler and a chart to get the centering.

Neither is all that precise, but they're probably good enough.

I understand what it does but I'm not sure why you'd need it. The opinion of the grader will determine how the centering is going to affect the grade of a specific card.

I guess what I mean is even if you determine the centering is mathematically equivalent to the minimum standards listed, it's going to be the grader's discretion and they won't accept your measurements.

Thanks for the replies.

All I am asking here is do you go through any sort of evaluation of what you send prior to shipping them to the grader. If not, ok.

If you do, what do you do?

I get the point as to who has the final word when it comes to the card grading.

Regards,

I don't have one, but have measured cards a few times with the really accurate ruler I use for stamps- and that seldom gets used for measuring distance, It's mostly a perforation gage.

The few cards I've sent in, the question was more "is it a 4 or a 5?" And I didn't pay much attention to centering.

I suppose if I wanted to try for 9s and 10s, I'd want to measure the centering before sending it in. It seems more "scientific" than me "well this card looks really really good so in it goes" Which didn't do as well as I'd hoped when I tried a few modern cards. A 9, mostly 8's and a couple 7-7.5s

Do I think the graders will actually measure? No, probably not. But even at the old regular prices limiting the ones most likely to not grade high seems sensible.

Steve,

Thanks for your comments. I would expect the graders to have some sort of measurement as to centering. They must IMHO, in order to differentiate between a 50/50, 60/40 and on down the line.

I am not trying to make all of this scientific in any shape or form. I am just curious as to what the people here do as a gauge to prepping cards for the grading.

I will eventually send some in and am just wanting to pull from the experience on this board.

Cheers,