Autumn Stampex "Faults" - NOT AN ADVERT

A brief search on e-bay through up another batch of Hytech "faults". These are strips with missing or poorly positioned text.They are on offer at up to just under £200. One example is illustrated below.

A similar occurrence was reported about a year ago where similar stamps were produced at Stampex. A note on their existence also appeared in Stamp Magazine. It was reported then that this sort of fault was produced by pulling on the strip as it was printed. The advice given at that time was not to touch these as they are not genuine faults but constructs by the purchaser.

To overcome this problem, the previous machine was modified by the addition of a guard. This was not included on the current design. 

Be warned! These are probably NOT genuine faults. I suggest that they should NOT be purchased.

A follow up item on the Norphil Blog has suggested that a fault did happen. One person commenting claims to have videoed this fault as it happened. The engineer was called and the fault fixed. The kiosk in question was A1.

I can confirm that at 12:37 this machine was working correctly on the Friday and the session number was 259. The above item from ebay and others on that site have session numbers around 300-310. Another correspondent on the Norphil Blog site reported that the kiosk was working at 14:45. 

I still have some doubts but, given the circumstances from Autumn 2011 Stampex, I feel that it is best to question an item than pay over hard cash and then find out that someone has "worked the system".

NOT AN ADVERT

There also seems to have been a bit of a slip up in installing stock (possibly on the Saturday) where the cattle stamps had been put in the printer that previously was used to print the flags. This occurred on kiosk B1 which was at the back of the Royal Mail stand.

Some genuine varieties have been posted on ebay. These are cattle stamps from Wincor-Nixdorf kiosks where, for some reason, font 1 has reappeared leading to the usual partially missing text varieties.

This examples, here, are from Kings Square, Gloucester with the office ident 014523. This fault has been reported at this office on previous issues. 

Strips of the missing "up to 10g" variety from the same machine are also available on e-bay.

NOT AN ADVERT