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https://net54baseball.com/showthread.php?p=2284949 Corey has an interesting post later on where he talks about looping the Plank from the batch. |
Sure. The OP was all about Kurts cleaning cards and so the debate was about whether its ethical to do things to cards that would get them back more to their original state. I only objected to the counterfeit thing because its original state is not legitimate (aka fake). I didn't see the comparison. Just IMO
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" If by definition you “don’t know” that you may be collecting an altered card - and that doesn’t stop you - well then it must not be too big of a problem then is it?"
This is what I was responding to -- not from you. |
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Having been priced out of a big chunk of the hobby, I really hate these threads.
Rather than go over to the dark side, lets do this. If you believe the alterations done with the magic spray, a stick from the art store and a meth pipe are undetectable, send one my way and lets find out for real. |
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When Travis, mentioned the price of the Wagner increasing to 75K, I thought "Wow that card is more than my entire years salary." |
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It's more that people are making a lot doing fairly easy shady stuff. |
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If I can expand a bit - No, if I'm looking at a card with obviously thin borders in a PSA 8 slab, I don't throw caution to the wind there, and say well. It's not altered because it's in the slab. There is a Mantle base card I know of in a PSA 10 slab that has suspiciously thin borders; but I digress. I guess I was trying to draw a distinction between altered cards (I'm fine with using Kurt's methods as the example, since so many obviously tend to lean toward that being across the line) that at least currently cannot be detected, or cannot be detected definitively and/or easily. I'm sure it's different for each person. Does it "not matter" only if you cannot tell yourself that the card "definitely' was altered before you add it to your collection? Or is hearsay about what did or did not happen to the card with it's previous owner or handler come into play? How much provenance is required? Asking again as my only point here is that given current methods today, the "act" can usually be separated from the evidence it does or does not leave behind. And the major point of judgment on whether or not a card is "altered" continues to be tied to the physical evidence and what a grader does or does not say, or what a discerning collector can or cannot see regardless of a pronouncement on a flip. Until the technology improves, much of the discussion remains academic - even if we all agree Card Doctors Bad / the act itself even in abstentia remains deplorable. |
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For what it is worth by my earlier quip logic - if a Rolex was entirely fake and you "can't tell" I think that places this situation in the same boat. We can deplore fake Rolex makers for the act, but in the meantime a lot of fake Rolexes may trade as authentic with nobody much the wiser. |
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Now that the auction is over, I'll post a picture of a correctly graded card and ask:
Would you buy this, break it out, soak it, send it in for grading, and then sell it? The card is graded a "1" due to the crud on the back. Watching Kurt's videos, I'm sure the crud could be easily removed. The card has nice centering and could probably come back graded a 3.5 (or better). The price difference could be up to $1K (from the price for a "1"). Worst case, if it came back AUTH due to someone detected the soaking, you could still probably break even on the card because it has very nice visual appeal. The final hammer (with BP, but no taxes or shipping added) was $900. Any guesses if we'll see this card cracked, soaked, resubmitted and back to an AH? Probably better to just sell it without the AH this time around. Attachment 606580 |
I personally would not but I don't see how it would be any different than buying a house, fixing it up and flipping it.
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I guess the incoming argument will be that people know the house has been renovated/remodeled.
I can see that side too. Sticky (haha) subject |
Chris,
I see your point and am not debating anything here (and I realize you're not trying to start a debate). I was merely wondering what people thought about the question in post #178. My opinion doesn't matter, but here it is. I don't see anything wrong with a little "cleaning". For example erasing pencil marks and things like that. I never realize soaking could do as much as it did. I've only soaked one card. It was a T200 team card that was adhered to a page in a book. The card came off the page, but my impatience probably resulted in a few extra creases in the card. Lesson learned, you better be patient if you're going to soak. Do I see soaking as a problem? Still not sure about that one yet and if there are affects on the card material if something other than nice clean water is used I do not support ANY kind of trimming. I still think TPGs should only give numerical grades to Zeenuts that have the coupon (for, example). Also, TPGs should avoid assigning numerical grades to cards razor sharp corners that don't meet the standard size requirement. I get it, people think there's a lot of variation in card sizes. I say, yes, but why is it that many cards with razor sharp corners are assigned numerical grades. The TPGs should err on the side of caution and rethink the grading philosophy. Taking out creases? I've seen this going on for 40+ years. I remember the first time someone showed me how to do it. I was a bit surprised and tried it on a few new cards with great success. I don't have it in me to try it on true vintage cards. In many cases I can spot a card with a crease removed and cringe when I see it, especially in a graded holder. If material (cardboard/ink) is added in anyway, then that's just wrong unless it's disclosed during a sale or through grading, but I can't imagine anybody would just tell the TPG about it because usually they're trying to get it slipped past the TPG. Counter to that, removing ink in an effort to create an error card is just wrong - I couldn't imagine anybody disagreeing with that. It's for that reason I'd never buy a graded T206 "nodgrass" error card. |
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Yes, the buyer will certainly be attempting to clean this card up. Nearly every time a card like this gets auctioned, the buyer is someone that believes they can fix it. Cards like this sell closer to their potential, as opposed to their current state. They almost never sell for "comps" because people who know how to clean them compete against each other and will always outbid someone who is just bidding on the card with no intentions to improve it. No, I did not win the card. But I do know who did. As for whether it will end up back at an auction house in the near future in a higher slab? My guess is no, it won't. The buyer picked it up for their PC. |
Should this card be soaked?
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I recently "upgraded" the SweetCap460-25 in my T206Elberfeld,Washington Fielding back run. I decided that I preferred the 2.5 despite the grime over the 5, which looks altered. So, now I am curious if the Snowman thinks the 2.5 would benefit from soaking?
https://www.net54baseball.com/attach...1&d=1706014626 https://www.net54baseball.com/attach...1&d=1706014631 https://www.net54baseball.com/attach...1&d=1706014637 https://www.net54baseball.com/attach...1&d=1706014641 |
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The 5 may have been cleaned at some point. I would say it's more likely than not. Whether it has been trimmed or not is difficult to say from a scan though. |
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T card sheets/sheet remnants are incredibly rare and it is unfortunate the baseball ones seem to get destroyed so quickly that they aren't even photographed first, leaving non-baseball sheets/remnants as the bulk of demonstrable uncut evidence. |
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I don't see a problem with cleaning, I wouldn't try with the card from post 178, because some white glues don't dissolve with water. I might try a bit of water and a q tip to see if it will. But that would be a coin toss on wasting the money to reslab it. Undetectable? maybe on some sets. Not on all sets. The way curt presses out creases and other damage is almost for sure detectable. And I've offered to prove it, with no takers. |
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I agree that pressing out creases is detectable. But Kurt doesn't press them out. Ever. In fact he expressly states numerous times that to do so is a bad idea and damages cards. He only adds moisture to the cards and then let's them dry slowly. Usually, the creases he works on do look somewhat better, but they rarely disappear. They typically just look more relaxed. |
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Soak, poke at the crease with an artists blending stick, smooth with a glass tube on a stick, press between glass to dry out. All that is right there in the video. I can't see that as anything but pressing out a crease. Is it still visible in the video? Yes, a bit. But there's little enough that it would change the grade. If missed it would be a drastic change. |
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PSA 4 to PSA 7: https://youtube.com/shorts/yM8EDunuN...BxrlCbAkVRCuQo Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro |
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I don't know, I think this is great for all of us commoner collectors. Now we don't need a million dollars to build a million dollar collection. We just need a box of creased cards, $20 worth of Kurt's Card Cream and our own sweat and blood. How much better can it get!
Sent from my SM-S906U using Tapatalk |
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My question is: Once I put in the work on my cards to remove all those unsightly wrinkles and polish them up a bit, can I just put them right up on BST for sale? Or do I have to send them to PSA first for a final cleansing?
Sent from my SM-S906U using Tapatalk |
hahahahaa!
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I think some people just tried to keep it a secret because they want to "hold all the cards" so-to-speak. They want to make money from it and they don't want competition. If too many people know how to clean cards, then there's no money in it for them. But with social media and the DIY/how-to culture of the younger generations, knowledge is power and is much more freely available. There are countless YouTube channels today that are dedicated to restoration techniques of anything and everything collectible from antique tools to box cars to casino chips to comic books to sports cards and anything and everything in between. Most people just like nice stuff. They don't care if it has been cleaned. In fact, they prefer it. They care that it is original & not counterfeit. I align much more closely with that viewpoint. I'd much rather everyone knows about what actually goes on and pull back the curtains than to sit there in silence and hope nobody else figures this out. That some people choose to conflate an original item that has been cleaned with one that is counterfeit is not my concern. G1911 can continue on in his delusion as long as he chooses. The rest of us are going to continue to soak cards, push down bent-up corners, and wipe off fingerprints and smudges from the surfaces. Sorry, not sorry. |
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If you brought a dress shirt to a tailor and said you wanted to get an alteration done on it and asked for a quote, they'd look at you like you were crazy after explaining to them that the "alteration" you'd like to have done is just to have it steamed (or ironed, steam cleaned, etc.). |
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How many cards have you … tailored into higher grade slabs? Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro |
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Just curious btw, if you do these things yourself (and I acknowledge they are less concerning than the big three of trimming, recoloring and rebuilding), do you disclose, and if not why? |
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I have damaged cards in the past and later resold them with full disclosure, highlighting the damage in both the title and in the description along with clear images in my listings. If a card has been damaged or altered, I believe it should be disclosed. But if it has simply been cleaned in a manner that leaves nothing behind on the card and does not damage or alter the card stock in any way, then that's immaterial to the value of the card as it has no bearing on its market value. There is simply nothing to disclose in that case. It would be like disclosing that a truck had previously been farted in. The fart is gone now, so the market doesn't care. The card market cares about the present state of a card; its current condition, and whether a card has been damaged/altered (which are arguably interchangeable terms in this context). The market does not care if a card previously had something on it which is no longer there. You could take any card I've cleaned, crack it out of its slab, and resubmit it one hundred times and it's going to pass grading every time because what I do does not damage or alter them in any way. It is immaterial with respect to its market value. If there is nothing on the card or nothing missing from the card, then there is nothing there to disclose. We should all care far more about sellers and auction houses listing cards with creases that aren't visible in their scans and not disclosed in the listings than we should about a card that used to have something on it that is no longer there. Or if it used to have a bent-over corner that has been laid back down. I only care about a card's present state, and so does the market. Also, this idea that the only reason people don't disclose something as simple as having gently cleaned a card is because they're being deceitful and want to defraud others is nonsense. That may be true of something like trimming or recoloring, but it's not true of something as benign as card cleaning. The reason they don't disclose it is because there is nothing to disclose. It's absolutely immaterial. And unlike me, most people have no interest in getting into discussions with delusional people online who wish to publicly crucify them if they don't see things their way. This is the real reason people choose not to disclose these sorts of things. It's just not worth the drama. |
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Also, it is you who needs a refresher on the definition of 'original', not me. Here is the contextually relevant entry from the Oxford Dictionary for 'original': Quote:
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Interesting thread. This is the same existential crisis that the Antiques Furniture went through years ago. It reached a point that anything done to a piece of furniture immensely reduced its price. I wonder if sports cards will go this pathway.
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I recently saw this card posted on social media. It is not my card. But I'm curious which version of the card everyone here would prefer. The one on the left, or the one on the right after it was cleaned?
In my opinion, this card was rescued. In the image on the left, it was clearly altered. On the right, it was restored back to its original state. ... |
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Come on, that was somewhat funny, right. This is an interesting thread regarding opinions/perceptions of "altering" or "enhancements". Shows some real passion on the collectors that are far right and far left. Ok, let's not start trying to figure out which is "far right". It'd be interesting to run a poll that allowed for more than a single selection. The poll could keep a tally of all participants and a list of items considered "card doctoring". Now, for the soaking part, the poll should include soaking with only water or soaking with more than water. What would those polling items be? Trimming :mad:, adding color, adding material for fixing holes/corners, crease removal, what else? |
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Yes I have strongly criticized your constant defenses of altering cards without disclosure among another other highly dubious, at best, behavior. This should not be difficult to see why. Altering items and selling them without disclosure is unethical and illegal. If it did not matter and no one cared, then there would be no problem discussing the work done on a card. There would not need to be a cover up every time it gets sold. If it was not illegal to alter cards and sell them as if they were not altered, then Mastro wouldn't have had it included in his deal. Did you even read the definition of original you copied in? Look closely. Read it. "the form or language in which something was first produced or created." You genuinely can't see why hobbyists have long used 'original' to refer to form? Now here's the bigger problem - where did I use the term "original" at all here? I didn't refer to undoctored cards as original at all in the transcript. I used "original" and "originally" twice in the digression on the fictional perfect fake ring in post 108 and don't seem to have used the words any other time in any context whatsoever. Where did I use it wrong? Again, this is a forum. There is a transcript. Reading a transcript is not difficult. You can do it. You do not need completely make things up about even the most pedantic things lol. Yet you choose to every single time. I guess that fits with an ethic that non-disclosure and fraud are just fine and dandy though, so it makes some sense. |
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This is getting silly. What if my 6 year old brat nephew intentionally spilled some soda on it? Now its altered?
Also, G1911 is the most negative poster on this board. Soooo many threads. He has got be pushing 50 posts on this thread alone and they are all combative or snarky. We will get 4 more soon attacking me now. Quote:
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Whatever any of us thinks about the ethics of improving cards, it is happening. And it will continue to happen to the extent the work done is undetectable. People can rationalize all sorts of things if it is their interest to do so, and the economics of turning low-grade cards into PSA 7's is in a lot of peoples' self-interests.
I am wondering how material this will be to the overall market. Soaking and cleaning seems to me to be prevalent already, and Greg Morris doesn't even lower their grades for wax stains anymore, probably figuring the buyer will just rub it off. So some of these improvements are already being commonly done, and I think don't have much potential to increase significantly. I guess if you have a card with a crease and nice corners, you should expect to get more for it now. I'm not really sure how many of those cards are out there though, and if "fixing" them would be enough to skew the market. If there are enough 3's that turn into 6's and 7's it could cause those top end values to slide, but who knows. So bottom line what I am wondering is whether this is a big deal or not. Sent from my SM-S906U using Tapatalk |
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As to what you did say, straw man, it has a different more specific meaning with respect to collectibles and you have been in this hobby long enough to know it. Everyone here understands the concept of altering cards, whether or not we disagree on what is acceptable and what is not. The Williams on the left is not altered, the one on the right is. Is the alteration acceptable? One could I suppose debate that. But you've jumped the shark if your claim is that the one on the left is altered. Or you're just doing the contrarian thing again. |
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In this hobby, the interpersonal landscape is extremely unhealthy. It's a whole different ball of wax. Perhaps unironically, I've even had people from this hobby (Blowhard forums) stalk/follow me over to the casino chip hobby and try to "out me" there for cleaning chips and creating YT videos showing people how to do it and how to make custom chips, as if I was some sort of con artist. It was actually quite hilarious. Because in that world, nobody cares. No one. They just laughed at the sports card guy screaming at clouds. The amount of vitriol spewed by people like G1911 fosters an environment where people simply don't care to have open and honest conversations like these. When stating that I prefer to clean my cards is met with claims like, "You're a fraudster and a con artist!", that door to open and honest conversation gets closed. Unless and until that changes, I don't think people are going to feel comfortable making such disclosures. It's the same reason people don't express their political beliefs anymore on social media. They don't want to deal with the blowback at work or in their personal lives caused by a band of cancel culture psychopaths whose only goal in life is to take down anyone and everyone they disagree with. So, in short. I'd like to see anything and everything openly disclosed and discussed in this hobby. Is that realistic though? No, of course not. Not as long as there are legitimate psychopaths running around trying to set people on fire for cleaning their baseball cards. |
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At the end of the day though, what is it that people actually care about when it comes to their cards? They want to know if there are any flaws on it and what those flaws are. The whole concept of "Authentic Altered" is an arbitrarily applied construct. Perhaps best exemplified by your statement below where you wrote: Quote:
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If it's a problem ethically, we can debate, but we're already across the Rubicon on those things. It's being done, and the cards are out there. So, if every collector bought a Kurt's Card Care Kit and cleaned all their cards, I don't think it would matter much because I think most cards that needed to be cleaned already have been. Working out creases is new to me, but I wonder how many cards there are out there that would be high-grade except for a crease. Are there enough that, if they were all fixed, it would affect the market? I don't know. Sent from my SM-S906U using Tapatalk |
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I can't wrap my head around your viewpoint here. Honestly, I can't comprehend how anyone could come to the conclusion that the Williams on the left is not altered but the one on the right is. Yet, it's your honest opinion. I see this as a rather arbitrary application of what it means for a card to be altered. Different strokes and all.[/QUOTE] Maybe we should do a poll. I would bet a tiny percentage of people would think the Williams with a big stain is "altered." |
Interesting debate. Correct me if I'm wrong on this - perhaps I'm just misremembering: When I first got back into the hobby about 8 or so years ago, whenever a card was in an authentic altered slab or something to that effect, it was looked at as a Scarlett Letter and could have been had for considerably less than a raw unaltered or low grade example. Now I feel as though as long as it has good eye appeal, an altered version of a sought after vintage card is worth considerably more than a lower grade example. Again, I could be way off on this, but I feel like that's the way it's trending.
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I think AA cards are for the most part trimmed, re-colored or otherwise structurally altered. I remember good looking AA cards used to sell above ugly PSA 1's and 2's, but I don't know if that has changed at all. Sent from my SM-S906U using Tapatalk |
The card on the left has been altered by your own definition. Something was done to it that changed its appearance and value.
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What's doctoring or would be accepted? Soaking? Perhaps the poll should include soaking with only water or soaking with more than water. What would the polling items be? Trimming :mad:, adding color, adding material for fixing holes/corners, crease removal, what else? I just don't know how to set up such a poll. |
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