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I was looking at four crowns (one an upgrade). I knew they'd all be expensive as I don't have many crown gaps these days. In the end pushed the boat out on one which was over 3x top estimate & gave up on the others. Have to give up collecting until October now to get back on budget!

We had this discussion a while ago. Dave Greenhalgh was here saying you only had one blow with the hammer, which is unquestionably true for small coins (he does this all the time). The hammer can bounce leading to double striking, but I think the question of more than one blow could apply to larger modules. I used my type 5 halfcrown as an example, see below. There is unquestionable double striking by the horse's rump and by the S on the obverse, and the N & H on the reverse. The relief of the obverse has a significant change of angle which is obvious with the lighting, and a similar profile change in the diametrically opposed part of the flan. I couldn't see how a bounced strike could produce such a large change of angle whilst still producing what is quite a well struck up coin. Looking to pick holes in my thoughts, the only way you could get this profile with a double change of angle would be if the die was cut with the angles as seen, which isn't impossible. Although it is counter-intuitive to presume the die was engraved on a deliberately non-planar surface, I suppose an angled profile such as this would constrain movement along the 1 o'clock/7 o'clock axis, but the lower and less angled profile on the 10 o'clock/4 o'clock axis would allow some lateral movement. The double striking seen on this coin would agree with the above, so maybe I'm wrong in thinking it was struck more than once. Don't have a ouija board to find out.

Nothing for me. That Churchill satin crown at $9,500 (= about £9,500 after extras) - not bad for 10 minutes work on the surfaces with some blue tinge. Oh, what a cynic - not that that is my area of expertise! Even that Soviet medal from the late 80's which looked like something out of a toy box circa 1960 made $15,000 hammer. That James II halfcrown also caught my eye - an excellent example of the type, almost full detail. Needless to say, I dropped out very early in the bidding. The fact that Greg Edmonds spent an eternity on many of the lots unfortunately seemed to work in his favour. 45-50 lots/hour is excruciating and some fingers unfortunately must have lost patience, anything to move him on!

I've been looking at this too and am wondering if it is a trace of a former die that hasn't been polished out. There are plenty of polishing marks which suggest it had a former life and some of the residual lines are wider than file marks being the same width as seen on the shield quartering, such as that by the harp.

Marlybob1: The gift that keeps on giving….. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/The-name-of-the-latest-big-blunder-2021-error-coin-A-bargain-TRY-ME-A-QUID/124517952727?hash=item1cfdd92cd7:g:y-EAAOSwLulf9bpT

From the Guardian website today: The Met Office has issued an amber weather warning for heavy snow across eastern England, with people told to expect travel delays, power cuts and a chance that rural communities could be cut off. The big picture: the right kind of snow, London 2009 People in East Anglia woke up on Saturday to a thick layer of snow that had settled overnight, with the conditions expected to continue until the afternoon. Most of the rest of England and Scotland have a yellow snow alert in place, which will last until Saturday evening. Oh great.... You know what Frank Zappa told us about yellow snow, well, it looks like we are going to get some......:(

I think biting sarcasm for the sake of balance is a misunderstood art form!

They could have been held back and subsequently melted. So anyone with mint reports for subsequent years? I don't have any evidence, but would suggest that with the silver price up tenfold in the prior year or two, every man and his dog was sifting 5p and 10p bags from the banks for silver. As far as the mint and banks were concerned there was every reason to expect demand would be reasonably stable, so the collapse of the silver price was a real spanner in the works. The demand would have melted away virtually overnight, and the unanticipated return of large numbers of shillings and florins would probably not have been foreseen by the mint which was essentially striking in anticipation, but was crucially one stage removed from the banking front line. It would have been compounded by an apparently strong demand for the two denominations as the silver price rose leading to an effective glut dated 1980 and to a lesser extent, 1979.