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Generic Lad

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Everything posted by Generic Lad

  1. Generic Lad

    Tissue Test

    I saw that over there. I read about spittal and tinfoil on hammered.(Not to rub) What's a clad coin? Is it something an archaeologist pulls out of the wall of a 20thC house? Very good question, I hope I don't have one! Most of this "tissue test" comes from people in the US who coin-roll hunt, or who don't know if a foreign coin is silver or not. When opening up rolls of half-dollars to search for silver, there are 90% and 40% silver coins and coins that have no silver. When looking at the edges, its easy to tell if a coin is 90% silver or not because a 90% silver half dollar will be solid white. 40% silver coins look similar to coins with no silver in them, although they might look a bit "green". 40% halves were minted from 1965-1970 but there have been reports of some very rare wrong planchet errors dated 1971. The problem is, people flood forums anytime there is a funny looking 1971 edge and claim its a rare error worth $1K+ (I've never seen someone discover a 1971 on a 40% silver planchet despite reading 75 threads+ about it). Since apparently a lot of people in the US don't have a scale to weigh them, people have come up with the "tissue test" to help mitigate the flood of these false threads. Among US coin collectors, a non-silver coin is often called "clad" because US quarters/dimes dated 1965-present (and post-1970 halves) are copper-nickel clad. You can see the cladding on the edge where there will be the white stripe of nickel and the reddish-brown of copper. US collectors will also incorrectly refer to non-silver but non-clad coins (such as 99.9% nickel Canadian coins) as clad, and so in US coin forums clad just means non-silver. Even more confusingly 40% silver half dollars are correctly called silver-clad, but such a coin would not be called "clad" in a US forum. Really, the best test for circulated coins to tell if they are silver is the "sound test" (this is quite useful when rummaging through a dealer's "junk bin") copper-nickel coins will "ping" when dropped while silver will "clank" although the alloy does make a large difference (a sterling coin will sound different than a 40% or 50% silver coin). Of course this test isn't exactly recommended for expensive high grade coins! Forgot to mention, clad on eBay has a different meaning, generally meaning plated in order to deceive buyers with titles like: "1 Troy ounce .999 clad silver bar" which have 1 troy ounce of something like nickel or copper that is plated with pure silver.
  2. Generic Lad

    Ebay's Worst Offerings

    http://www.ebay.com/itm/1891-Queen-Victorias-one-large-penny-coin-recondition-and-sanitize-just-for-you-/170950467309?pt=US_World_Coins&hash=item27cd711eed Well, that's one way to advertize a cleaned coin...
  3. thank you for that,i apreciate it. trying to find out about coins is harder then i thought haha. is there any value to this coin? i will try and upload much better pictures later on. thanks Its worth more than 20p, however I can't really tell you how much more because I'm not really sure what the market would be over there. If it was, say, a dime with those errors in the US it would run in the $3-5 range.
  4. Its possible that the top of the cross is a possible doubled-die? The problem is that having it on both sides is more of a sign of strike doubling, a one-off error that is worth substantially less than a true doubled die. The blobs would be die breaks, also one-off errors (although with a large enough sample size you could see how the die breaks progressed, although that is nearly impossible with something as common as the 20p)
  5. Are there trace elements found in KN issues that aren't found on normal issues? Perhaps someone who has an XRF analyzer could see if the "signatures" match. One of the coin shops near me actually has one and while it isn't 100% accurate it would show if there are any unusually high trace elements when compared to one struck by tower mint. Its pretty interesting to use with Roman bronze coins because it shows that the different mints each had different alloys, for example, one of them tested near pure copper with a bit of tin, while another was nearly 20% lead!
  6. Generic Lad

    Ebay's Worst Offerings

    Marketing, you're doing it... Well, I can't tell whether this is an incredibly terrible attempt at marketing a crappy coin or a quite good one... http://www.ebay.com/itm/1971-Eisenhower-Dollar-U-S-Coin-Hurricane-Sandy-Survivor-/261132076435?pt=Coins_US_Individual&hash=item3cccaf4593
  7. Generic Lad

    Ebay's Worst Offerings

    Its like a lottery. Get a proof/mint set and submit in a couple, if any get a "perfect" 70 you get 4-5 times the money than even a 69 will. More than makes up for losses, plus I think you can get bulk rates if you submit enough. Quite silly that people pay 4-5x the money for a coin lacking just a small nick or scratch that a 69 will have.
  8. What is a good rule of thumb for the value of cut hammered coins? Assuming a coin was neatly cut in half and has nothing wrong with it (other than the fact its cut!) and was one of the types that frequently is found cut (something like an Edward penny, not like an Elizabeth I shilling) what percentage of catalog price is typical? 25%?
  9. Is it possible that if it were a contemporary counterfeit (don't know enough about early milled gold to make that decision!) that it could be made with lower purity gold and the remainder made with platinum? Because I don't think platinum was very valued in the 18th century and its got a weight similar to gold. Of course now its as valuable if not more so no one is going to fake a modern coin like that!
  10. The main problem with details grades (especially if bought sight unseen!) is that the same descriptor can mean entirely different things. "Improperly Cleaned" can mean anything from you can barely see the coin due to the hairlines or that there are slight marks that indicate that the coin had been cleaned at some point in the past. Naturally there's a world of difference between the two coins and of course the grade of "Improperly Cleaned" means there must possibly be "Properly Cleaned" leaving it up to the grader at NGC to determine it. I really don't understand why TPGers are so popular over here in the US since they seem to do more harm than good.
  11. Generic Lad

    Ebay's Worst Offerings

    http://www.ebay.com/itm/1861-British-One-1-Penny-Coin-in-Well-Circulated-Condition-/250914971789?pt=US_World_Coins&hash=item3a6bb2a08d I'll just leave this here with no comment...
  12. I don't know how popular it is over in the UK, but over here in the US Craigslist is fairly popular to sell coins and since you sell things to fellow collectors you get very close to retail prices. For US junk silver I can usually get 95-105% of spot for even 40% halves.
  13. Generic Lad

    Help needed with unknown coins.

    http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/greece/thrace/istros/i.html ^Pretty sure that's your coin http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/greece/thrace/istros/t.html ^that link might help a bit more (same info, just with images displayed and not just text)
  14. I'd only get them if they were selling at or below scrap price. Not really all that interesting to me though I would like to pick up the 5p one, I've already got the 2 silver proof set of that.
  15. Anyone ever look at bullion shops for rare varieties/high grade? I've got a few that will keep anything British, foreign, or interesting out for me and I've gotten some scarce coins (nothing scarce British wise but have gotten a few key date central/south American coins) along with a large tin filled with Victorian bronze that I paid scrap copper price for. Anyone else do the same thing? I'd imagine it would be fairly easy to find scarce varieties being sold for melt.
  16. Generic Lad

    Ebay's Worst Offerings

    Yep, eBay has gone downhill recently, first requiring slabbed coins which makes bargains nearly impossible to find with US coins because a slabbed coin instantly adds $10-30 to a coin's price. Now the redesign and the wildcard searches... However, there doesn't seem to be any other good auction site out there that doesn't charge absurd fees for buyers (like Proxibid does!) and has a decent selection of coins (like every other auction site). eBay also makes international transactions relatively painless, something that's nice because buying from someone in the UK or in Denmark is just as easy as buying from someone in the states.
  17. Generic Lad

    1887 jubilee set

    Here's one on eBay, that includes a picture of the case. There's no guarantee (without provenance) that all the coins were originally part of the same set, but look for consistent toning. http://compare.ebay.co.uk/like/380489341246?var=lv&ltyp=AllFixedPriceItemTypes&var=sbar&cbt=y (I hope you can see that ok - when I first saw it you could switch between the pictures which were normal-looking not all squashed up like they are from that link. If it looks funny, try one of the other sets linked below it, then do a "go back" - it should correct itself). Are you sure that's the original case? Because it said at the bottom its in a modern case. Granted, I know nothing about Victorian proof sets so it could be the original since I've got no clue what an original one looks like
  18. Generic Lad

    What do you reckon to this ebay seller?

    All the ones I see for sale and on recent sales history look polished and have classic damage from cleaning/polishing.
  19. Generic Lad

    1775 Halfpenny

    Yep, stick something on there about that it could have circulated in the colonies and say that it was dated the year of the start of the American Revolution and you have an instant $30-40+
  20. Generic Lad

    Hello, New here !

    Not much for the US coins, your Ike dollar is worth $1 and the proof set might be worth $5-6 (perhaps up to $10 if they are deep, ultra, cameo proofs with frosted designs and mirror like fields) but US proof sets have next to no demand, even over here in the US. I've heard stories of dealers paying less than face value for some of them!
  21. That's interesting. The coins still featured the fasces in 1945 . I'd imagine everyone knew what it was in 1945 - certainly Mussolini used it liberally, not to mention the half dozen other fascist states that were falling or had fallen, by then. But they'd switched it for a torch by 1964... I don't remember reading that the fasces ever really carrying a negative connotation on the Mercury dime despite its connection to fascism. I suppose since its been on the dime since 1916 that people just got used to it, whereas if they had introduced it during wartime it no doubt would have gotten more attention! The dime was redesigned in 1946 to honor president (dictator for life?) FDR who had recently died. On the other hand, poor John Sinnock got a lot of press for putting his initials on the dime because people thought a Soviet agent at the mint had put those initials, JS for Joseph Stalin. So when he designed his next coin, the Franklin Half Dollar he used his full initials (JRS) and still rumors persisted that it was Stalin's initials (despite Stalin's middle name being Vissarionovich!). Similarly, Gilroy Robert's stylized signature on the Kennedy Half Dollar was taken by the paranoid American public to be a hammer and a sickle (it does resemble it vaguely). I guess during the Cold War Americans were expecting Soviet agents at the mint putting secret designs in the new coinage!
  22. What about the bicenntial quarter? got one of them as well, probably from a roll. Extremely common. They made over a billion of them. For Bicentennials (quarter, dollar, half dollar) the only ones with value over face are the proof/silver uncirculated ones. You can tell this because they have an "S" mintmark. For US coins, there aren't many true rarities after 1955. You've got a few condition rarities but that's about it, the silver coins are worth silver scrap (1964 and prior halves, quarters and dimes are all 90% silver, 1965-1970 halves are 40% silver) but the rest of the intended for circulation stuff is really only worth anything in high grade. There are a couple of varieties (1970 no S proof dime) that are worth quite a bit but most of those there are only a handful known. However, with US coins there are varieties/rarities aplenty when you go back a couple more years. For example the 1955 doubled-die penny, the 1942/1 Mercury dime, the 1943 pennies struck on copper planchets, etc. are all truly scarce coins and command big bucks. If you really want to get into collecting minor varieties, pick up some Morgan dollars and look for VAM varieties. The Morgan dollar is essentially America's bun head penny in that there are so many documented varieties with near date, far dates, die breaks, etc. some which are so tiny that no one notices to others that can turn a $40 coin into a $400 coin. I asked about them. unfortunatly (for me) he sold all of them at a fair). he also didn't have any 1966 pennys except a few in the scrap which were YUCKY Yeah, cheap and fun US coins to collect are: Mercury dimes (expect to pay $4-7 for one in AU-low uncirculated grades, or $2.50 (silver scrap) for a common date in circulated grade) Wheat pennies (I don't particularly like them, but common dates can be found circulated for 3-50 cents, or $1-2 in BU) The entire Jefferson nickel collection can be bought in circulated grade for about 10-20 cents per coin (most can be found in change over here in the US, but naturally if you're not in the US you'll have to pay over face) except for a couple key dates (like the 1950-D) and the 35% silver war nickels (1942-1945) which sell for about $2 in silver scrap. Buffalo nickels can be found for cheap, especially if they have no date, the date wears off very quickly but can be chemically restored by soaking in various solutions. This will naturally damage the coin, but it can be a fun treasure hunt and a cheap collection since dateless buffaloes sell for little more than 7-10 cents. If you just want a type set, you can find a proof set (before 1999 will be the cheapest since 1999 started the state quarters program and so they have more coins and therefore are more expensive) with some searching you can find some with excellent cameo contrast and frosting. Most modern commemoratives trade near silver melt. Also, you might want to grab a copy of the Red Book for US coins (see http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/1582381887/ref=tmm_hrd_used_olp_sr?ie=UTF8&condition=used for an example), its a pretty useful reference and if nothing else it gives you nice pictures of the coins. For an older version (pictures and such will still be there, prices will be slightly off) you can pick one up for essentially just shipping.
  23. What about the bicenntial quarter? got one of them as well, probably from a roll. Extremely common. They made over a billion of them. For Bicentennials (quarter, dollar, half dollar) the only ones with value over face are the proof/silver uncirculated ones. You can tell this because they have an "S" mintmark. For US coins, there aren't many true rarities after 1955. You've got a few condition rarities but that's about it, the silver coins are worth silver scrap (1964 and prior halves, quarters and dimes are all 90% silver, 1965-1970 halves are 40% silver) but the rest of the intended for circulation stuff is really only worth anything in high grade. There are a couple of varieties (1970 no S proof dime) that are worth quite a bit but most of those there are only a handful known. However, with US coins there are varieties/rarities aplenty when you go back a couple more years. For example the 1955 doubled-die penny, the 1942/1 Mercury dime, the 1943 pennies struck on copper planchets, etc. are all truly scarce coins and command big bucks. If you really want to get into collecting minor varieties, pick up some Morgan dollars and look for VAM varieties. The Morgan dollar is essentially America's bun head penny in that there are so many documented varieties with near date, far dates, die breaks, etc. some which are so tiny that no one notices to others that can turn a $40 coin into a $400 coin.
  24. The 1983 US quarters are a bit confusing. You find them in change all the time here, but they are rather scarce in mint state (BU/FDC) because the US Mint for some reason didn't release any mint sets in 1983 meaning that any mint state coins have to be found from circulation or original rolls. Since roll saving had not paid off well for collectors since the end of silver in US coins, most collectors were busy assembling proof sets or accumulating the commemorative coins that the US Mint was releasing for the Olympics, the first commemorative coins released since the 1950s. This ends up with a coin that is by no means scarce (there were over 600 million minted!) but is hard to find in BU/FDC condition. http://www.ngccoin.com/news/viewarticle.aspx?IDArticle=572 is a good read about 1983 quarters.
  25. Generic Lad

    Ebay's Worst Offerings

    Indeed. And £200 for it. Bizarre! Daniel Carr's stuff is actually pretty collectable. He's designed a couple of quarters for the US mint (Rhode Island and New York I believe) and acquired an old coinage press from the Denver Mint and has been producing coins of his own design on it and a lot of "what if" coins such as a 1964 Franklin Half Dollar, and a 1964-D Peace Dollar (the US mint struck some Peace Dollars in '64 but melted them all back down). They're high quality strikes over a coin from that period and while they often sell for more than what I think they're worth (I'd spend like... $2-3 over melt for them) I must say I enjoy his parody state quarters! http://www.dc-coin.com/parodystatequartersetc.aspx
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