Peckris 2

https://www.fleur-de-coin.com/articles/coin-striking It's done at the same time. I would therefore infer that the collar on one particular die pairing was incorrectly aligned and has caused nearly 3% of the mintage (if your sample is accurate) to have that particular pointing.

It was actually easy in the end - I just did a Spotlight search for 'Declan' and there it was! Proves that good naming brings its own rewards. Unfortunately, after eBay changed its search software, it became rather more complicated, but FWIW, here is Declan's technique: Perhaps I should share one of my trade secrets. Don’t tell anyone. This is a filtering mechanism that I have developed over many years, and tonight, it reduced the list of what was presented to me from nearly a quarter of a million results to 66,000. That means that 75% of the list is removed before I even see it, and if you sort your query by Ending Soonest, it means that I really can have a quick look through eBay to see if there is anything finishing tonight that takes my fancy. Make a cup of tea at this point if you’re still with me – I am going to go into some detail. All the examples I’ll use are my own personal preferences but I do understand that what I consider to be tat, others may consider to be treasure, so do forgive my ruthlessness. I start by listing everything in the British Coins category, sorted by Ending Soonest. Tonight it was around 225,000 items. I use a three-stage process to reduce this number to something a little more manageable. Stage 1: eliminate things I don’t want to see, like 50ps and 20ps. Stage 2: eliminate sellers whose tat I don’t want to see Stage 3: set a maximum price so I don’t see things I can’t afford. Stage 1: Eliminate terms used in an items description, in my instance, this could be things like “50p, 20p, pound, proof, gold”. You do this in the top search bar in eBay, using the syntax: -(xxx,yyy,zzz) I don’t want to see decimal coins, so a lot of my exclusions are dates. You cannot use wildcards. You used to be able to, but that’s a different story… Soon, after playing with this a little bit, you’ll run up against a character limit. eBay think that it is 100 characters, but I have found a workaround to extend that limit to 300 characters by enclosing three separate 100 character strings in three separate bracket pairs: -(100 characters here) -(100 more here) -(and another 100 here) Go one character over and it goes a little bit haywire, but you can always go back a page in your browser to recover it. 300 characters will keep you going for a while, but eventually, you’ll run up against that limit too, so you’ll want to use your 300 in the most effective way. Some terms exclude thousands of items, and some only exclude a few. “50p” excludes 35,000 records, while “brooch” only knocks out 127, so I rank the search term exclusions by how many records they exclude, and only use up my 300 on those that are worth using. As we are limited by character, a small term, like “50p” (3 characters), is a lot more economical than a long term, like “enamelled” (10 characters). This is where it can get complicated, and I leave it up to you, and the level of your own Asperger’s how far you want to go with this. It gets complicated because items have more than one word in their descriptions, and you may already have eliminated an item with an exclusion already used. Take gold sovereigns, for instance. A search using “gold” brings up 6,500 results, so we can knock out 6,500 items by including “gold” in our exclusion string. A search using “sovereign” brings up 4,000 results, but we cannot exclude a further 4,000 by using “sovereign” because most sovereign listings will also use the word “gold”. In fact, only 650 listings used “sovereign”, but didn’t use “gold”, so by including “sovereign” when we’ve already used “gold” we only reduce the list by 650. “Sovereign” is 10 characters, so at 6.5 items/character, “sovereign” is a very inefficient exclusion term. Once you are happy with your query, save it. I tend to save it in a text file, because eBay’s query management is not very intuitive. The last time I did this exercise, in January, it was all about getting rid of Beatrix Potter, now it’s all about eliminating pound coins from the list, so I refresh my query three or four times a year, as trends change. My 300 characters removes more than half of the items in the British Coins category, about 100,000 listings. That’s more than 300 per character, but it has taken many years to get it refined to that level of efficiency! Stage 2: Seller exclusion. Anyone who spends any time watching eBay will already know the sellers that they tend to skip through, and there is a facility to remove those sellers from your query, in addition to the exclusions settled on in Stage 1. Scroll down the left-hand side of the listings page, and you’ll see “More Refinements”. A tab in that section is marked Seller, and in that tab, there is an exclusion box. Select “Only show items from”, then “Specific sellers”, then choose “Exclude” from the drop-down. The text box to the right is intended to contain a comma-separated list of sellers to exclude. However, there is a bit of sloppy eBay programming in this form that needs a little workaround. You cannot add seller names to this list one at a time without breaking the query before long – it adds spurious commas and spaces all over the place and the database just can’t handle that, so I keep my “eBay blacklist” in a trusty text file, using the syntax: Seller1,seller2,seller3 No spaces, a single comma between names, and no carriage returns. There’s 100 odd sellers on my list, but I’ve been building it for a while. To update the seller list, update it in the text file first, then copy and paste the entire list into that little text box in eBay, in one hit. Editing the contents of eBay's text box directly never ends well… My seller list removes a further 40,000 items. Finally, Stage 3, removing items that are too expensive. This bit is easy, there’s a little box on the left-hand side that for once, is quite self-explanatory. I change this every time I run the query, depending on my budget that day, and it usually reduces the list by a further 20,000 items or so. If you made it to the end, congratulations, and I hope that’s helpful!

This is the Edinburgh to Kings Cross journey - over 4 hours long!

There's a train simulator series on You Tube - very realistic! - which clearly demonstrates that train drivers regulate their trains according to minute detail every few hundred yards or even less. A driver that is doing even 1mph over the limit would be reported if he/she hadn't braked enough in time. It's quite enlightening!!

"Circulation" includes being kept in the compartment of a purse, wallet, or even clothing. If owned by a non-regular collector it could have worn by frequent taking out, showing off, or even rubbing. The gradual wear might have taken a long time to be noticed by such a neophyte. It's telling that such worn specimens are pretty rare, so their being accepted by traders rather comes into question, especially if only a few score "circulated" in the normal way.

I did store it somewhere - if I can find it (might be a long job!) I'll post it.

That's outrageous. Even though I say they were NOT for circulation, they are legal tender, so it's possibly unlawful for banks and the RM not to change them for other currency. I think we may be using the words 'circulation' and 'currency' in different ways? It seems possible to me that you mean a coin that's neither a proof, specimen, or pattern would come under those headings? Whereas I mean that a coin that was not struck / issued to be spent by Joe Public in shops or other transactions (i.e. not part of the money supply), is neither 'for circulation' or 'currency'. By my usage, Wreath crowns (for example) were not under any circumstances struck for circulation or the mintages would have been significant, and we have it on record (somewhere) both that the Treasury abandoned crowns as an everyday denomination in the early century, and that wreath crowns were only issued in very small quantities to collectors and their ilk. The 1952 halfcorwn is a very interesting case. It is EITHER a pattern (only one ever having been struck) OR is the sole survivor from the beginning of a currency strike of 1952 halfcrowns, the rest of which were melted down when the King died. In which case - and given that the unique specimen DID circulate - it could be regarded as a circulation coin. It's certainly true that if the King hadn't died, 1952 halfcrowns would have been issued. In any case, it's not a crown!! I'm not sure what you mean by 'strict definition'? I'd still claim that a 'first year of reign' is a commemoration. What else would you call it?

Declan Magee created a customised filter to exclude all the dross from searches, which presumably could be adapted for anyone's own use?

This is getting into the realm of unwanted argument! I already said the 1902 question is open though it raises the question of why no other Ed7 crowns were issued. Wreaths were clearly NOT issued for circulation, as can be seen from the extremely low mintages; my understanding is they were issued for collectors or those who liked the design, and may have been sold via ballot? (Or perhaps that was just the precious metal proofs). 1951, 1960, and 1965 we agree were commems, though the numbers of 1965 crowns was so high (public demand?) that it could be argued they were also for circulation though I never ever saw one in change, or anyone offering one as payment. 1937 and 1953 were 'first year of reign' which by definition is a commemoration. In all my time as a collector, I have never seen a single crown of any date in circulation as currency. Never.

Believe me - finding a fully struck breastplate is very uncommon (except on the recessed ear varieties)! That's as good as it gets with a decent obverse. Lovely penny.

Also, don't forget that 2019 is the 20th anniversary of Chris Perkins' coin website - the Royal Mint should commemorate that as it's definitely more of an anniversary than the rubbish excuses they come up with to make money!

Yes, I would class 'faulty striking' as for an individual coin. However, weak strikes especially due to worn dies are quite common (some denomination years are known for it, see above) so I personally wouldn't class 'weak' the same as 'faulty' but YMMV.

Yes, commemorative as in "first year of reign". Crowns were not produced for general currency purposes after 1901 (some might argue for the 1902) and were either issued as specimen proofs (1927), in response to 'coinie enthusiasm' (wreaths), commemorating a jubilee (1935) or special event (1951, 1960, 1965), or commemorating the first year of a reign (1937, 1953). Sorry, I don't understand your point?

I think the position of the 5 is significant. But not the tail of the 9 which can be affected by die wear.

True enough - but the number for 1858 seems to dwarf any other date.

Sorry to be pedantic, but there weren't any currency 1937 crowns - they were all commemorative.

Yes, that's another example where the weaknesses on the reverse are quite normal. I'd say the BU value in Spink is for a normal strike and you could add a premium for fully struck up examples. They're scarce!

Very nice.

Nice tone. Good purchase.

I'd say 'no' - the grade refers to wear. However, a good or poor (rather than an average) strike should be part of the description and would affect the value. Another point to bear in mind is whether the coin in question is most usually encountered weakly struck; one example would be the 1895 YH farthing where the catalogue value takes into account that the reverse is generally quite weak, and a good example would carry a premium over that.

It's no wonder there are so many varieties for 1858. It was intended to be the final year for copper pennies and therefore the reuse of older dies made perfect sense - it was only the drastic delays caused by the problems with bronze that put the changeover back at least 18 months.

Agreed. (Or to put it in terms the RM understands, "a greed")

I wonder if one could treat a coin NOW, that was Unc-BU, with hypo? This could, for example, be recent but the seller hasn't made anything of it and appears to be offering it as a normal 1937. If someone was treating such pennies recently, you'd think they would say "RARE MINT TONING" or similar.