Soaking 101

[Leon]

Brad, nice write up and spot on with my own experiences. I have probably soaked at least a few hundred different cards, stamps and ephemera myself. If a card is totally submerged it will usually change a shade (or more) in my experiences too. Admittedly I haven't tried your specific way of minimizing the color change, but I think I have done something close by trial and error.

[1880nonsports]

wipe a wet card......

[Runscott]

This thread got me thinking about a few cards I had planned to soak - specifically, some of the ugly T206 Hindus I have had on ebay for a year. I took out three and spent most of the day soaking them. Unusual, yes. But my experience illustrates the problems you can run into because of the wide variety of glues used in scrapbooks 100 years ago. Most of the time the glue (and paper residue) either slips off easily after 10-20 minutes of soaking, but sometimes it needs encouragement. Sometimes it isn't water-based glue, and so nothing helps. But my cards had very strong water-based glue. It took around 10 hours of soaking, and encouragement (rubbing with finger, etc) to get it to a point where I finally gave up. Definitely some success, and I'll post 'before and after' pics after it comes out of the book pile.

This subject has been beat to death, and we have threads where our exact techniques are detailed, but the main ingredients I use are a large flat container with warm water, lots of typing paper and a large pile of heavy books. I've done it for over 10 years - it works.

[Leon]

Not long ago I picked up what was described as 3 (or 4) stamps stuck to some paper. After soaking them it was these 4 and several more. I think there were about 12 stamps in total (could be off by a few). SGC did a nice job of protecting these.