Success with resubmission of "trimmed" cards?

[steve B]

Originally Posted by Jetsfan

Thanks for the advice. I'm certainly disappointed. Oh, well. Sounds like I'm not the first person on the board to have been burned by a trimmed card. When I bought it I thought cards from that era could be cut in ways that weren't quite perfect. Wish you guys were around in 1990 when I bought it...kind of feel like a sucker.

The upper left corner looks a like it was trimmed slightly. Corner wear can be a tough call. Too uneven is sometimes a sign of trimming, too regular and even is also a bad sign. Both can also be just fine. I saw one batch that had been stored in a narrow box for a really long time. All the lower corners were rounded, all the tops were fairly nice. At a quick glance they looked trimmed.

The edge quality is the real key. The cutters would generally leave the front edge slightly rounded and a little ridge on the back side that typically shows some chipping. A sharp crisp edge front and back is usually a bad sign. But a newly sharpened blade will get pretty close to a sharp edge. A dull blade leaves a very ragged cut.

Cards from that era can have odd cuts.

A diamond cut on the sides of a T206 is unusual, but not impossible. Cards that are oversize and undersize are fairly common. Two of the ones I've sent in are nice, but didn't make the minimum size.

Than there's the cuts that are just odd. Like this one caused by some debris in or under the stack of sheets being cut, probably a bit of wood coming off the strip the blade goes into underneath the stack.

Is it trimmed? Nope. Will it grade? Probably not, and that's not a bad thing. Not understanding the edge quality makes some people see every slightly undersize card as a TPG mistake, if it graded, it would be viewed as a really bad mistake. They do make mistakes, as we all do. I have a few trimmed cards, and a couple I'm not sure about.



And one that wouldn't grade because the top and bottom cuts are just too rough.




Steve B