It's Time To Crack Out Your Graded Cards
 

According to the Hall of Fame, slabbed cards may not be such a great idea. Is it time to crack out all of our graded cards? I don't think so.

Check out link to article:


https://sportscollectorsdigest.com/c...YVjReEa8L20SrY

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Well, I have cracked every card I ever bought out so I have the HOF on my side now ha

The Hall of Fame is about history and preserving the game. Graded cards for me is all about the benjamins.

Stick with graded cards

Graded card case can sustain a dog bite and toddler abuse

Whenever anyone does anything, there is a reason and there is a REAL reason.

“There are other reasons why cards in slabs are removed,” explained Sue MacKay, director of Collections at the Hall of Fame Museum. “For instance, thicker slabs require more storage space, but the main reason we do it is we’re just not sure if the slabs might eventually damage the cards.”

The REAL reason they're doing this is storage space. Everything else is just made up so they sound like they know what they're doing.

I did like the idea about drilling a hole in a ball cube though. I'm not a big autograph person but have some key ones.

The most common cause of damage to cards is handling them. So if they're in a holder of any reasonable kind, it's best they stay there.

I thought the article was well written, and explains openly that purpose has a lot to do with conservation. To each their own. Further, there are a few collectors on this site that advocate for mylar sleeves. So IMO, this article is for non-NET54 collectors to receive similar information that we ourselves discuss in threads.

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I do not have any slabs, but hey, I don't have a 1952 Topps Mantle or a T206 Wagner, either.

I personally dislike slabs - although my best cards are slabbed. To me, TPG seems like Communism: the idea sounds great if everyone honors the system; but when put into practice there are too many individuals with bad intentions for it to work. There needs to be more safeguards and oversight, which is currently lacking, in order to protect the consumer. Of course, no one wants oversight, but without it the scammers have no reason to quit.

Slabbed cards are like pretty flowers that smell bad.

From the article: "The good news is that while heat is damaging, cold conditions are not, so if in doubt store in a cool, dark place."

Okay - baseball cards, you're going in the refrigerator. I'll find some other place for the yogurt.

Hmmm cut out the middleman in peer to peer transactions...twist my arm why don't ya!!

Just do the drilling without the ball being inside...

Do it during a stretch of low humidity to avoid condensation inside the slab

Hmmm.....

Or I can believe the advice from oh.... like every conservator, archivist, curator....

Library of congress doesn't worry much about issues of storage space. But they do worry about acidity of paper items, so much so that they tried to develop a system to de-acidify books in massive quantities. It wasn't very successful.

Most of my collection is in 3 X 4 Top Loaders. Are they any safer than the slabs?

In case anyone is thinking of doing this, a trick I learned about drilling into plastic with a regular spiral twist drill bit is to run your drill in reverse, as the heat from the friction of the drill bit will 'melt' the plastic, and will not grab (and potentially crack) the plastic, as it might do if running the drill in the forward setting.

Brian (your friendly Net54 non-cracking plastic drilling expert). Bonus fun info: if drilling rubber freeze the item, as it will also make grabbing less likely. I don't think reversing drill bit direction is necessary.

Wow. You really think Communism could work if people just honored the system? The "system" denies individual liberty - it's not people's bad intentions that cause it to fail. It's people's desire for freedom that causes it to fail.

As for the topic: I hate slabs as well, but they're a necessary evil.

No, I don't think Communism would ever work. But it's the idea of a utopia which is supposed to be a good thing. But like all other utopias, they fail because someone's pleasure is another's pain. The symbolism vs. reality holds true for TPG. They are supposed to be the utopian place where problems in condition are sorted out by knowledgeable independent graders....but in reality they have become more of a dystopia since A) they aren't as knowledgeable as we hoped and B) they are no longer independent and C) they aren't sorting out the problems the promised to resolve. And like most fictional dystopian scripts, we have found it very very hard to exit this story due to perceptions of its necessity.

It also says in the article that: "Another chemically inert product is polypropylene, which is slightly less clear than polyester like Mylar, but is also considered acceptable for long-term preservation."

Binder pages and penny sleeves are made out of polypropylene. So, if you want to keep using the top loaders, you could put the cards, as many do, in the penny sleeves before you put them in the top loaders.

I also just put them in the top loaders also. I'm not going to worry about it. I like the immediacy so to speak, of just putting the card in the top loader and going through and looking at the cards that way. It's the closest to how we handled them as kids. But that said, I do also have a lot of cards in binders!