CAPs Albums made a video to show off their system (below). The company's updated webpage now makes it a lot easier to create your own coin-page headings and coin titles under each hole for the appropriate Airtite holder. This seems to be the best commercial "Airtite-coin-album" product, especially for those of us who want to make our own kind of album. Collectors who want to put their world coins into an album really have no better option, I think.
Anybody know how an intercept shield album compares to a CAPs album as far as protection from air is concerned?
I would think the CAPS album superior to even Intercept Shield's painstaking efforts to create archival material quality and "sacrifical anode" technology. CAPS requires you to use Airtites, and no coin is safer than when air can't reach it. There is a tradeoff in individual coin visibility since Intercept Shield albums store coins raw. Both work well.
Now that is how you make a coin album. If only it had a sleeve or outer case with intercept shield or a similar technology, it would be perfect. This is exactly the type of album I would buy if I didn't mainly collect certified pieces.
In some old thread, I put a few drop of blue injet ink mixed with a few drops of distilled water in an airtite(tm) holder and immerse it very gently to the bottom of a beaker of distilled water , which turned blue in a short time with no agitation, just brownian movement. Maybe better than the average, but even they don't say it is 100% air tight. The "bellows" effect of changes in atmospheric pressure might even cause movements in and out, but I haven't tested that.
I use airtites on quite a few of my coins. They have to be changed every few (anywhere from 2-5) years. Sometimes sooner, nothing is 100%.
Thank you for taking the time to carry out an experiment and share the results. It is refreshing to see someone make fact based statements based on actual experimental evidence.
Any type of storage flips, airtites or whatever is used is up against several factors. I think the most important is climate. Where I live is real humid 9 months out of the year. Storing is an almost never ending cycle. I pull my collection out periodicaly to check for any environmental damage including toneing. I know some people love it & some looks real cool, but the black & brown I can really live without. I think the cardboard & mylar flips last longer than the airtites sometimes. But either way they have to be changed every so often.
That's interesting to know. I kind of suspected that we'd see some sort of imperfect sealing if we got down to the molecular level ( ); one can't expect something as cheap as an Airtite to display perfectly flat surfaces at a dimensional tolerance capable of achieving an interference fit that's also possible to pry apart later. But in the real world, where Red copper in TPG slabs can stay Red for decades - examples abound - and in conjunction with the other appropriate long-term storage steps, I see no reason to believe it isn't possible to achieve an effective air exchange rate of sufficiently close to zero with Airtites for our purposes. Especially if your plan is to ruin the whole arrangement by ever taking the coin out to look at.
