Sunday, April 17, 2022

Are these the wrong plastic pages to use?

For my decade stars / binder collections, I’ve been gathering just enough cards for individual players to see if I can display them in a page - maybe my decade stars collections is meant to be more of a passive project, but it's fun to churn out new pages to see loose cards come together by player.
During a card show pit stop last weekend, I wanted to buy some random supplies and there was an opened box of BCW plastic sheets for a quarter each - my go-to pages are usually Ultra Pro, but I'd used up my last box of 100 and to bide my time a little bit, maybe I'll try the BCW pages in case I end up liking it more.

To see if I can get something done through the afternoon this past Friday, I wanted to see if I can finally start displaying some loose cards for a number of subjects - my loose Tom Seaver cards were probably next in line to be displayed in pages since he was at the top of my current list of 'legends' with 12 cards.

I started to pull the loose cards out of penny sleeves to fit them into the pages one-by-one - though it feels like the BCW pockets are a little stiffer and tighter where they just barely cover the cards.

I still remember getting a box of Ultra Pro plastic sheets on eBay back in 2016 with a bad batch of pages - where the middle 4,5,6 pockets seemed ‘short’ and didn’t have a lip where there is a little gap ‘up top’ to cover the cards in their entirety.

For the most part however, the Ultra Pro pages give my binder cards a heftier, snugger fit most of the time - I don't know if I can leave these Seaver cards 'as is' in a BCW page without worrying the cards being subject to the conditions.

I might have wasted $5.00 on a 20 count of BCW nine-pocket pages that doesn’t give me peace of mind - the problem maybe obvious for the cards that have colored borders, but they seem to be spilling out of the page and I guess that is the risk I took in trying these BCW pages out.
A common sense solution for some peace of mind was using penny sleeves for each card, to add a little bit of ‘lip’ that might be missing up top - I just had enough 'still in package' penny sleeves to see if I can rejigger the page with an extra layer of protection of each card.
Maybe the cards end up being a little more secure, but after taking some pictures, the top portions of the cards really spill out a little bit - where these sheets look a little sloppy.
Where these BCW designed for sports cards or gaming cards where the dimensions might be a little smaller [?] - I might be able to use these BCW pages for smaller, odd-sized cards but the plan wasn’t to pick up loose sheets and prioritize all those itty-bitty stragglers unless there was a pressing need to put them away somewhere in the first place.
I might keep trying to play around with these BCW pages - but these are no good for me.

1 comment:

Jon said...

As far as BCW pages go, I've only ever used their 4-pocket pages, and those have always been good. Maybe these were from another bad batch?