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I successfully nabbed a Peter Nichols Pheon cabinet off eBay a couple of weeks ago for almost bang on to the penny what I had budgeted for. Lovely little thing. Very pleased with it. I'm just now getting organised to get everything organised. Great success.

My Grandad father died peacefully in his sleep, unlike his passengers screaming.

Run out of Zeros

1918S George V Sovereign

1692 William and Mary Scottish 10 shillings Quite a rare coin with Numista rarity of 100

Your setup is much more sophisticated. I just attached my Sony 5000 camera fitted with E mount macro lens to an Aldi tripod. the coin was placed on a sloped matt black surface. The camera position was adjusted to be normal to the coin. The photo was taken using a delay to minimize movement with a clip on LED desk lamp probably 3000 K. for illumination. The image was cropped and the file size reduced using irfan 64 photo editing app.

I didn't acquire this coin, but I did acquire a new camera - A Sony A6400 and a macro lens that works quite well for sovs. Here's a 1958 Gillick. Lighting is a small ring light held about flush with the end of the lens, and a little LED spot shining in from about 10:30. Enjoy.

I recently obtained an almost complete set of the Education Union series - just the Shilling outstanding, where I know of only 1 example. Photos to come in following posts.

Just speculation, but I would think the bronzed were all made for the boxed sets, with a small number of singles made in copper.

Mine is much like yours before the makeover. I've not bothered with any planting this year apart from some gladioli corms left over from last year. Fortunately the globe artichokes, primroses and the campinola (?) can be relied upon to take the eye away from the rest of the jungle. The "grass" is fighting a losing battle with the moss as usual but you can't really tell when it's been scalped. Not sure what he was looking for in our suburban Yorkshire border but he didn't find it.

I will never forget the sad face of the old man as he slid across my bonnet.....

I have just printed off the label asking for an exchange. I also managed to get to them on the phone and the chap said they will check before posting a replacement. Can't say I am convinced. Let's see what happens this time.

Rather sadly, I don't have any doubt now that shabbiness is the norm of the Royal mint. No respectable business would tell you that there is a two month wait for an email to be answered.

May 9th Victory Day memorial in Uralsk, Kazakhstan. Someone has a sense of humour (and topical relevance)

Agreed, no evidence of top of 3 going through top of 4. In my experience if you tilt a genuine 4/3 you will see the 3 quite clearly.

Yes they do!

This is how I set it up. The camera itself is mounted on a little desktop tripod, with an adjustable gantry that lets you twiddle the position of the camera. In practice the gantry isn't really necessary. The ring light is mounted on a tripod with a double ball joint dohickey, and the spot light is mounted on a smaller, flatter tripod with the same type of double joint. The ring light gives you a relatively flat base lighting and the spot gives you the specular reflection and anisotropic reflection from the surface finish. The stack of books just raises the subject, and the copper bar is a paperweight to keep the books flat. I'm using black construction paper as a background - I bought a packet of it off Amazon. Other folks like microfibre cloth or velvet, or you could do a light background with white paper or card. You'll have to provide your own sovereigns. The PC screen in the background is significant as I'm using the camera through tethering software. Sony provides a tethering application for their cameras called Imaging Edge - in fact, the primary reason I got a Sony camera was that it had good support for tethering. In theory the A6xxx series should also play nicely with open source photo applications, but I haven't been able to get Darktable to mount it (although it does recognise the camera). Imaging Edge is free and seems to work fairly well with a few limitations. It doesn't have support for automated focus bracketing, as far as I can tell. There are third party apps that theoretically do this. Currently I haven't thrashed out a solution for this. You would need this to do focus stacking if you wanted to take a coin from any angle other than straight on. Photoshop will do the focus stacking if you have the images, but I haven't worked out a way to do this with the A6400 under tethering control yet. It will export to JPEG, but only at relatively high grades (i.e. images too big for the measly size allowance supported here). I had to import the files into photoshop and then re-save with a lower detail setting. Fortunately you can still get decent image quality at settings that will produce images small enough to upload here. Sony's native raw format (ARW) isn't directly supported by Photoshop, although it is supported by Darktable. Fortunately Adobe publishes a conversion utility that will export DNG files that Photoshop can read through its RAW file importer. On the plus side, it works well with the lighting and it's far easier to get decent pics with than the smart phone. The camera cost me £650, which is about as cheap as I've seen it. I got it from a grey market box shifter but you might pay closer to £1,000 from a real camera shop. The lens was £185 from another online retailer. In practice a secondhand A6300 would do the same thing just as well, and I did seriously consider getting one. You can get those for about £350-400 off Ebay or other secondhand vendors. The tripods and lights would be about another £200 or so in total, although I have some other lights as well not being used in this setup. I think the price for this sort of setup could be kept to about two sovereigns if you went with a secondhand camera body.

A study found that a speed of less than 11 mph 100% of cars stop for a pedestrian crossing., at 15mph only 28% stop for a pedestrian crossing. Which would explain both road signs

1915 Silver Florin, NGC MS63, Scarce | eBay The listing is a very nice coin but the price is on the heavy side especially after freight and GST charges which bring the total cost to about GBP 200. I'm tempted but for the cost. Any thoughts?

My 8 year old granddaughter has just started collecting these and I was hoping someone might be able to recommend an album for her to keep her collection. I would prefer one which has writing which describes what is depicted on each coin. Thanks in advance

No expert on farthings, but generally speaking, I don't think Peck and Freeman obverses always match up. They certainly don't for pennies.

This "set" has helped me identify some variation in the die pairings so has served a useful purpose. I cannot say if it is a full set Rogers " a box for this issue is known which lists the contents as £1 to 1/4 d J R P King 1987 " He suggests " it is therefore clear that the different selections of denominations were included at various times or in various containers" Rogers page 75 Section 30

I got this specimen about 20 years ago and have treasured it since - 1920. Not quite as nice as the satin specimen “duck tailed” but pleasant nonetheless. I am challenged by posting decent photos let alone two or more. I will try to show the reverse in a subsequent post.

I'm not sure if they made a regular 1 + A proof outside of the VIP sets. Wow! You're lucky to have one of the matte versions. Seems like they're probably the hardest to track down. Maybe one day if you feel like selling I may be a potential buyer. 😉