Some guy did an actual experiment with this using an older black card to see the results of shaking a psa holder! LOL
Shake Shake Shake
There has been some debate about whether PSA cards are vulnerable to damage due to being shaken. There is a certain amount of play inside a PSA holder, and there has been contention about whether this play is enough that condition-sensitive cards will experience border chipping because they can rattle around in their slabs.
I decided to do an experiment in order to try to shed some light on this issue.
I took a PSA-9 1987 Donruss #43 Palmeiro and duct taped it to a gallon of paint, and had my local Home Depot store run it through their paint shaker.
I could detect no damage.
The details
I chose a 1987 Donruss for obvious reasons -- the black borders are extremely susceptible to chipping, and any chipping that the paint shaker caused would show up well to my eye and to my scanner.
I made three "before" scans of the card, at 300 dpi, 200 dpi, and 150 dpi. I still have all three scans, but in the interests of space, I'm only putting the 200 dpi scan on my website. I also carefully examined the card under magnification and took notes.
I put the card in my pocket, asked my wife what color paint she wanted, armed myself with a camera, a roll of duct tape, a digital timer, and some scissors, and off to Home Depot I went.
Once at the paint department, I told Tim the paint guy what I was up to and asked him if I could perform this experiment. He was fine with it, although he seemed a bit bemused for some reason, and he would have let me document the experiment with photographs, but he had to ask the assistant manager if he could do that and the guy declined.
Tim made my paint for me (1 gallon of Behr interior latex), and I taped the card to the lid of the paint can. I wrapped the card in one thickness of light paper so I wouldn't get duct tape goo all over the slab.
Tim put the paint can in the paint shaker, which is an "Ultrablend I" (the bench model, not the floor model), in case you want to repeat my experiment at your local Home Depot or other paint store. I didn't hear anything going (it really is "whisper quiet" as claimed), so I asked him if it was going. He said, "yes", so I started the timer. I estimate that about 20 seconds elapsed before I got the timer going.
I asked Tim how long he was going to shake the paint for, and he said three minutes. I stood there and watched the paint shaker quietly vibrate, able to only imagine what kind of hell was befalling the paint can and the card taped to it. It was actually almost six minutes before Tim took the paint out, so this was a good solid shake.
I could see no new wear on the card. The card had some chipping down the right edge to start with, but there didn't appear to be any new chips. None of the other edges had any chipping before or after the experiment.
I made three new "after" scans of the card, at the same dpi as the "before" scans, in order to document the experiment.
I conclude that being shaken for about six minutes in a paint shaker caused no appreciable wear on the card.
The evidence
Before:
After:
Sorry but the pics need to be big to show the detail.
Does the result of this experiment mean that you can bang around a PSA card all you want and nothing bad will happen to it? Clearly you can't, because it's well-known that the cases are susceptible to scratches and cracks. But I'm much less worried that the card inside will suffer damage than I was before. I don't believe that casual shaking will cause much problem if a mechanical paint shaker couldn't do anything.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the the Home Depot store located at 11616 Aurora Ave N in Seattle for letting me perform this experiment, and thanks especially to Tim the paint guy, who seemed happy enough to perform this experiment for me. Thanks to the assistant manager, who didn't throw me out of the store, although I wish he would have let me take some pictures.
.
Shake Shake Shake
There has been some debate about whether PSA cards are vulnerable to damage due to being shaken. There is a certain amount of play inside a PSA holder, and there has been contention about whether this play is enough that condition-sensitive cards will experience border chipping because they can rattle around in their slabs.
I decided to do an experiment in order to try to shed some light on this issue.
I took a PSA-9 1987 Donruss #43 Palmeiro and duct taped it to a gallon of paint, and had my local Home Depot store run it through their paint shaker.
I could detect no damage.
The details
I chose a 1987 Donruss for obvious reasons -- the black borders are extremely susceptible to chipping, and any chipping that the paint shaker caused would show up well to my eye and to my scanner.
I made three "before" scans of the card, at 300 dpi, 200 dpi, and 150 dpi. I still have all three scans, but in the interests of space, I'm only putting the 200 dpi scan on my website. I also carefully examined the card under magnification and took notes.
I put the card in my pocket, asked my wife what color paint she wanted, armed myself with a camera, a roll of duct tape, a digital timer, and some scissors, and off to Home Depot I went.
Once at the paint department, I told Tim the paint guy what I was up to and asked him if I could perform this experiment. He was fine with it, although he seemed a bit bemused for some reason, and he would have let me document the experiment with photographs, but he had to ask the assistant manager if he could do that and the guy declined.
Tim made my paint for me (1 gallon of Behr interior latex), and I taped the card to the lid of the paint can. I wrapped the card in one thickness of light paper so I wouldn't get duct tape goo all over the slab.
Tim put the paint can in the paint shaker, which is an "Ultrablend I" (the bench model, not the floor model), in case you want to repeat my experiment at your local Home Depot or other paint store. I didn't hear anything going (it really is "whisper quiet" as claimed), so I asked him if it was going. He said, "yes", so I started the timer. I estimate that about 20 seconds elapsed before I got the timer going.
I asked Tim how long he was going to shake the paint for, and he said three minutes. I stood there and watched the paint shaker quietly vibrate, able to only imagine what kind of hell was befalling the paint can and the card taped to it. It was actually almost six minutes before Tim took the paint out, so this was a good solid shake.
I could see no new wear on the card. The card had some chipping down the right edge to start with, but there didn't appear to be any new chips. None of the other edges had any chipping before or after the experiment.
I made three new "after" scans of the card, at the same dpi as the "before" scans, in order to document the experiment.
I conclude that being shaken for about six minutes in a paint shaker caused no appreciable wear on the card.
The evidence
Before:
After:
Sorry but the pics need to be big to show the detail.
Does the result of this experiment mean that you can bang around a PSA card all you want and nothing bad will happen to it? Clearly you can't, because it's well-known that the cases are susceptible to scratches and cracks. But I'm much less worried that the card inside will suffer damage than I was before. I don't believe that casual shaking will cause much problem if a mechanical paint shaker couldn't do anything.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the the Home Depot store located at 11616 Aurora Ave N in Seattle for letting me perform this experiment, and thanks especially to Tim the paint guy, who seemed happy enough to perform this experiment for me. Thanks to the assistant manager, who didn't throw me out of the store, although I wish he would have let me take some pictures.
.
