Background

Background

In the past, there have been several attempts by individuals to create a classification system for their own use.  Some of these have been adapted to individual ideas by others, some people just used them “as is”.  Book authors were the first people faced with the problem of how to organize their chapters, so each invented some sort of chapter title based classification system.  Some of these are limited to certain classes of corkscrews or to those from a particular Country.   However, none of these have been adopted by the corkscrew collecting community as “standards”.  But, there has been a demand for such standards from collectors, not just book authors.  Back at the start of the ICCA (International Correspondence of Corkscrew Addicts) in the mid 1970’s the first effort to create standards for classifying corkscrews was initiated, but with no discernible outcome – perhaps it was too early an attempt.  This was followed by Jan Ekman’s screw classification effort where he worked on the “screw” part only.  Others such as Joe Paradi, Klaus Biermann, Hans Türler, Frank Ellis and most recently Ferd Peters in his book on Mechanical Corkscrews offered some advancement on the issue.  Still, the need was not met.

The need for organization in one’s collection brings forward a number of tricky issues. It took three years of hard work and heated discussion but the SCReW system evolved to solve all of these issues. This system is described in detail in the first of the following documents and the background and development of the SCReW project is described in the others.

Organizing Record Keeping and Identification – A simple, yet all encompassing system was developed over three years by a number of corkscrew collectors. The system is called SCReW (Standard Corkscrew Reference Work). Explanations and rationale are included in this article, together with information on how to acquire the CDROM.

Part 1 of the SCReWbase Story – this is the introductory piece to how SCReWbase was created and what it does for the user.

Part 2 of the SCReWbase Story – This article deals with the issues surrounding the use of the SCReWbase system.  It deals with the issues in a Q&A format – this should answer all your questions!

Part 3 of the SCReWBase Story – The final article here deals with the details of how to identify a corkscrew and why the SCReW Decision Tree works the way it does.

The SCReW Decision Tree – This is a really handy method to find the right SCReW code for a corkscrew you have.

Corkscrew Quality Definitions – There are many arguments on how good a particular piece is, how much use damage can be considered as acceptable and is a damaged, but very rare piece, still desirable.  This article sheds light on this question.

Article on Class “Z” – Champagne and Soda Taps – this document explains how taps, a somewhat forgotten Class of corkscrews are classified.