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Showing content with the highest reputation since 02/03/2014 in Posts

  1. 17 points
    OK, we appear to have an issue here, so let's debate it. You appear to have a problem with Simon Willis - that's a specific issue between yourself and him. 'Dealers all deal between themselves'. - they do the world over. Every dealer has a list of customers and coins they require. They are hardly going to say I am not going to buy a coin for you that you want because it comes from another dealer! They usually have a good sense of underpriced coins, and also have to buy to offer a broad range of items when stock is short. i.e they have to buy coins, but other dealers are only a small section of the market place. 'set up price fixing between themselves'. Example? If a coin is common there is no way that the market can possibly be rigged. If it is rare or highly desirable, then the number available is unlikely to exceed one or two in any instance. The only instance I can think where there is some attempt to link coin pricing, is where the coins are slabbed, with a given number equating to a certain price. If people will buy coins unseen based on the slab number, that is a form of price fixing because (leaving aside the ability to resubmit to receive a higher grade), the grade is deemed to be set despite only forming one opinion amongst many. The same can not be said for raw grading whereby it is accepted that opinions differ and so the price for a given grade has more flexibility. If a coin comes from another dealer, then the selling price must inevitably be higher than the purchase price for the new owner to make a profit. 'shuffle customers like cattle'. Not sure where we are going here. I can't think of any dealers who consciously try to move their customers on to the next table. They certainly keep their list of customers to themselves, which is normal for any business. A dealer might tell a good customer where he can get a specific coin, but that is doing someone a favour on the back of past sales. 'lie on eBay'. Don't know as I haven't bought on there for well over a year. I haven't the patience to trawl through the more than 100K British coins listed. 'don't really have as much knowledge as they wish they had, but do they HAVE to be so nasty???' Again, a bit of evidence would help would help if you want to throw stones. We all wish we had more knowledge. Every area has someone who knows more than the next person. Judging by your post on my profile I assume you have included me in this section. For those who haven't looked it reads 'Gosh ain't you a fine example of the nasty arseholes I said populate this forum....negative nelly should be your name......you are certainly no expert in anything except bullshit'. If you would care to elucidate with specifics, I can make a reasoned response. If it was in relation to my reference to the NNC slabs. As 'Centisles' on eBay, he acquired a reputation on both sides of the pond for grading things much higher than anyone else. If it was with regard to the 1911 slabbed by a company neither of us have heard from, then the uplift in price from a PCGS or NGC 65 rating should be enough to cover the cost of slabbing. I also note you mentioned trolling on the MP thread. I made the not unreasonable assumption that you too were trolling. Your first 8 or 9 posts promised much, but then on Christmas Eve you managed to populate the entire first page (but no more) of the 'Free for All' forum topics in the space of a few minutes with replies, many comprising a few words with little in the way of punctuation or properly formed sentences. They hinted at sensible replies, but said nothing informative as there was no corroborative evidence or reasoned argument for the statement. A post asking for an Ansell sovereign is ok. You then listed 10 or 11 coins in the 'Items for sale'. For someone with less than 50 posts in total, nearly half of which were the mechanical replies made shortly before followed by listing items for sale, you were following a tried and tested method used by people trying to ingratiate themselves with a view to selling coins via something resembling a pyramid scheme. Overpriced silver slabs are the most popular product in this area. I think our friend Henry was the last person to try this on here. As I also mentioned, Chris is kind enough to provide this forum FOC. Whilst he has included a For Sale section, he is first and foremost a dealer and publisher, so we don't flood his website with adverts for our own wares. Certainly not with what is virtually an introductory message. Reasoned debate is always welcome here.
  2. 16 points
    Over the last few months I have been recording my collection. Shortly before leaving my previous employer I had put my entire collection under the inspection microscope and photographed them. Although the resolutuion is great the end results have been mixed in that the colours have come out understated and many of the proofs show a flat field where it should be mirrored. Another problem has been that some coins have taken a purple ting which I believe is a fault on the file saving process. Anyway I was made redundent so I'm unable to repeat any of the picture. Anyway for what it's worth here it is. https://onedrive.live.com/?id=943941AD323D5647!135&cid=943941AD323D5647
  3. 16 points
    Penny Acquisition of the year for me , just in time for Christmas. f164a Terry
  4. 14 points
    Although I'm spent up after Christmas, I really felt that with two recent price reductions to 71% of the original asking price, I just had to get this 1919KN penny from Lee at Colin Cooke, so cracked open a savings account to get it. Very pleased. It's GEF both sides in my opinion, although Lee described it as a/UNC. In hand it's actually still got that UNC sheen though, with the merest trace of lustre remaining in the obverse devices. It's a fairly good strike, with only very faint ghosting to the reverse, and some moderate hair detail. There are a couple of very minor edge knocks at about 2 O' Clock and 4 O' Clock on the reverse. Also what looks like a die crack extending from about 12 O' Clock on the obverse, South South East across the King's head to the top of the ear. That apart it's completely issue free. Unusually for a KN it seems to have toned dark. Or at any rate would have toned properly dark had it remained in circulation.
  5. 13 points
    I have to own up to buying the F112 at LCA a few days ago. The new bathroom has been put on ice and the atmosphere at home is a touch frosty. Your sympathy would be appreciated.
  6. 12 points
    Very pleased with this 1919kn that i just received. Not my pics, but they are spot on.
  7. 12 points
    Very pleased with the 1902 LT (lot 1285) I won at the LCA. True, I did pay over the usual odds for it. But well worth it in my view, as it's about as close to flawless as it's possible to get for a currency strike of that age.
  8. 12 points
    Another Ebay purchase I am pleased with arrived yesterday, surprised there were not more bidders as got it for £70. Nice F18, not advertised as such and much better than most, fairly worn dies as usual but little wear and a nice tone. Jerry
  9. 12 points
    My 1879 narrow date penny from the recent DNW auction has arrived. I'd estimate at GEF with some residual lustre. Really pleased, as this particular variety is extremely difficult to get in high grade, but not too scarce in grades up to VF. Bit like the 1864.
  10. 12 points
    Here's an article that I wrote for a Facebook group about a year ago - it might be of some use... "I often have a quick look through eBay on a Friday night. I find it’s at an altogether more sensible pace than the madness of Sundays. “A quick look through eBay”? How can you have a quick look through eBay? Wading through acres and acres of utter junk takes hours, doesn’t it? 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!"
  11. 12 points
    I was pleased to spot this as a 'buy it now' on Ebay, so I bought it then! Purchased on the first, it arrived today! I had been tracking it through Ebays 'Global Shipping' system, finally I can sleep at night. F24, with the missing top leaf. Cost me £150 all in, £40 of it postage via 'Global Shipping', what a p-i-t-a. But I wasn't going to argue, under the circumstances. One for your 'Rarest Pennies' page, Richard. Jerry
  12. 11 points
    The blossoms on my trees this year are amazing , we live on the top of a hill and its not unusual for all the blossoms to blow off, but the last few days have been kind to them and the result is a profusion of colour. Picture of my cherry tree below.
  13. 11 points
    My birthday present to myself. Well, you've got to!
  14. 11 points
    After 8 plus years, i think I've gone as far as I can, for the time being, on the 1860 to 1901 series of pennies. I still have some very obvious gaps, but the rarer pieces are very difficult to come by, so my acquisitions from this series have slowed to a trickle. As a result I've branched out to the pennies of George V. Most of these are relatively easy to obtain in UNC at much lower prices than the bun series, but there are some rare ones, or at any rate, rare in high grade. The KN's are among the few in that era which have an exceptionally steep price/grade differential. I'm therefore very pleased to have obtained this 1918KN, which, unusually for any pennies of that WW1 era, has an exceptionally good strike, with very good hair detail on the King's head. There is a tiny metal flaw between Britannia's arm and the trident, and the tiniest blemish to the right of the trident, neither of which detract. But that apart it's issue free and has noticeable residual lustre and nice even toning.
  15. 11 points
    Received this one yesterday. 1913 F175 Been after a nice one for ages. Terry
  16. 11 points
    A bit off the wall topic but hopefully it can start something. Over the years I've sent a few freebies to young (I assume) members on the forum. I've also given the local schools some coins when my daughters told me what period of history they were learning about. A while ago a new lady started working with my daughter.Talk went around to families and my daughter mentioned that I collected coins. The lady mentioned her 12 yr old son had been routing through her change looking for the best examples. Basically that is how I started many years ago so I have added my best examples to a pot and my daughter takes these in weekly for him. After a couple of weeks I got a phone call from this lad thanking me and he enthusiastically told me what he had. I felt good for this so I went through my vast mountain of predecimal coins and packaged up coins of every reign going back to William 111 and a couple of hammered and Roman. I snuck in a couple of better coins and some silver together with an old copy of collectors coins. A couple of weeks ago I received a lovely thank you card from the lad. Now it seems I've made a win,win situation as he now makes his parents a cup of tea every Sunday morning so they take him to local car boot fairs. The best thing about it he also takes a couple of pals along who have caught the bug. Apparently his pals parents have now taken up the duty of taking the lads on a rota basis thus leaving Mums and Dads to have some quality Sunday morning times .
  17. 11 points
    I am a bit unwilling to enter into this thread as there seems to be a lot of unnecessary testostorone behind some of the posts. My feeling is that any opinions on coins are valid but should be espressed in polite and respectful tones. Not all of us can afford perfect coins all the time and the joy for many of us is in the acquisition, not the possession. Being derogatory about other people's coins here certainly risks putting them off using this forum and may risk putting them off coin collecting all together, which is in nobody's interest. IMO the coin posted is around VF+ bearing in mind that farthings of this date were darkened by the mint so the tone is appropriate. Value is more difficult - in the end it is what someone is prepared to pay for it, so if the OP was happy with the price they paid, then that is it's value to them. As to grading, personally I don't go for that at all - I prefer to keep my coins in the raw so I can examine them when I wish to. Equally I have few coins that are good enough to warrant grading and having some of my coins in plastic coffins would throw off the balance of the others. But I completely understand other's desire to have their coins graded, so don't let me put anyone off!
  18. 10 points
    Yes, Gouby doesn't list this one.
  19. 10 points
    Domestic relations are an all-time low despite a gushing Valentine's card yesterday. The new bathroom budget has been blown again on Hiram Brown's F76. I'm in raptures about it but the other half is unimpressed.
  20. 10 points
    Also pleased with this 1904 penny I got from David Craddock. It's not the easiest date to get in tip top condition. Uncirculated with 95% lustre - ever so lightly toning. Unfortunately, evidence of a fingerprint on the reverse, and there is a small carbon spot on the obverse. Think I've finally resolved the colour disparity.
  21. 10 points
    Thanks Chris for all your un-lauded behind the scenes work to host, moderate and maintain the most important and serious (generally) of numismatic forums. I am sure we are all very grateful for what you do, I know my existence would be much impoverished were it not for the Predecimal Forum. Jerry
  22. 10 points
    Whatever your view on another forum member’s opinion the above post is entirely inappropriate and you should remove it or apologise for your language and personal abuse. We do not always have to agree but we do have to disagree in a civil fashion. Jerry
  23. 10 points
  24. 10 points
    Ebay BIN £60. Hard to find such bargains on there nowadays.
  25. 10 points
    @Paulus I am very sorry that I did not see this topic until just now. I have no idea how I missed it, but I only poke my head in every once in a while in the summer months, and I see it was posted in July. Nonetheless, I will post a bit below on my methods. Firstly, let me just say that your pictures have improved a great deal Paulus. You're capturing luster very well in your more recent images, and the focus is also much sharper. I feel a lot of people pay too much attention to the bells and whistles on fancy cameras or purchase really expensive lenses hoping that having the right (i.e., expensive) equipment will somehow make you a better photographer. For coin photography, the most important pieces are often the very inexpensive ones of the equation. Lighting is immensely important - I'd say the most important ingredient for taking good coin images. The type of light bulb (LED, incandescent, fluorescent) you use is less important, but understanding how to use that light source is key. For example, being able to set a custom white balance in your camera for your particular lights is key to getting realistic colors. The size of the light source (small bulb vs. large bulb) or the apparent size of the light source (e.g., a small light source diffused acts like a larger light source) is also important for fully lighting the coin's surface. The angle of the lights changes the appearance of the coin's surfaces a lot -- and your lights should always be placed above your mounted camera lens, if not even higher. With regard to lighting (in particularly angle), I wrote up a little article on the NGC forums some 3+ years ago, and I think it may be helpful. Keep your lights at a high angle to the surface on which the coin is placed, and diffuse them enough or use large enough light point surfaces to avoid hot spots on the coin. See my little schematic below of what my photography rig looks like. Second to lighting, I would say that mounting your camera on a solid copy stand or tripod is very important. Images taken with a hand held camera will be a bit "shaky" or lacking in detail. I have seen hand-held images of coins that get the message across, but the ability to zoom in and see details or inspect surfaces is very limited. Not only is mounting your camera on a sturdy surface important, but it is also important that your camera is aligned to the flat surface of the coin properly. By that I mean, the camera's detector (a small rectangular flat surface at the back of the lens where the image is focused) needs to be perfectly parallel with the coin's surface (i.e., in parallel planes). This is important for focusing reasons. The easiest way to make sure your camera is mounted parallel with the surface on which the coin is placed is to use a little mirror. Place the mirror where you would place the coin, and adjust your camera in the x, y, and z planes as needed until the center of your lens' reflection is perfectly centered in the camera's viewfinder. See the little schematic I created below. Lastly, practice, practice, and practice some more. I have now taken somewhere around 20,000 images of coins over the past 7 years. I have only been happy with my images for the past 4.5 years. It takes a while to get up to "happy" quality -- and I'm still improving my images and tweaking things today. I try to take at least some coin photos 2-3 days of every week. It just keeps me in the "zone". I hope some of these hints help a little. Best, Brandon





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