Peckris 2

In UK you can buy Surgical Spirit, which I assume is meths without the dye?

True, but most cabinets (and all Nichols?) use inert woods like mahogany. As for the free flowing air, you may have a point there - the toning is nearly all on coins in the large cabinet, which I later found was a medals cabinet with comparatively deep trays and no individual recesses for coins.

Snap. For example, I have a 1938S shilling that was absolutely BU - now it has an uneven dirty black tarnish on parts of it despite storage in a cabinet. Pennies have lost a great deal of lustre. Strangely, coins in flips or albums don't seem to suffer. The upside is that my Unc 1838 shilling that was so glossy you might think it had been polished, is now toning back nicely. The other weird thing is that coins in my small Nichols cabinet (Mascle?) are largely unaffected.

No, believe me - it's not the alloy mix. However, it COULD be toning; I've seen pre-1920 silver tone to a whole range of colours - reds, oranges, blues, purples - and this could be toning due to its storage medium.

Me too. They're much more rare in high grade but because of the shallow portrait the reverses are usually fully struck up.

There are several minor varieties of 1921, Mike (noted in David Sealy's 1970 varieties guide in the Coins & Medals Annual). The pre-1920 obverse hadn't even been noted at that stage! It's quite possible you have two distinct reverses there.

Not so much a fake perhaps (the date error is too obvious) but possibly an "evasion", i.e. a coin minted with a deliberate wrong date for purposes of trade in certain regions?

Look out for the 1921 with the pre-1920 high relief - it's much scarcer than Spink's values indicate, especially in high grade.

Absolutely correct - this was the first debasement of silver in the milled era and there was extensive hoarding of pre-1920, which is why it so commonly turns up in average of VF or better. 50% coins weren't hoarded, but also they wore more quickly due to the shallower portrait with less well defined hair. This is why it's uniformly more difficult to find top grade halfcrowns, florins, shillings 1920 - 1926.

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Yours, definitely.

Yes, I believe they did. I have some 1967 examples.

I knew it went back to at least 1966 for non-UK coins. Anyone know when Machin's was first used?

I was going to suggest toothpick holder! So I take a bow to the pomander guys.

I didn't know the answer. That's why I said "never knew that". The clue's in the words...

Mostly the site works as it should, but the 'Unread Content' feature sometimes has a bug. What happens is that with the list of topics the cursor doesn't change from a pointer into a hand+finger, so you can't click to enter a topic, and sometimes also the list of topics doesn't fully load. Reloading the page usually solves it (maybe after two or three attempts). This never used to happen, now it happens about every day. Anyone else noticed this?

What's the Elizabeth II florin doing there! "disastrous election result"? We don't all think that! It's true that had TM won a predicted landslide, she could have pursued a Chequers-style solution to Brexit from the start without worrying too much about the Europhobic rabble in her party (Rees-Mogg, Fox, Gove, Johnson, Cash, etc) and got us a reasonable deal. Now it's anyone's game, anyone's guess. As for 1945, Atlee's government helped shape what we know as modern Britain rather than the failing Empire mindset of the 1930s. Even Thatcher couldn't (or wouldn't) undo all of that. The British people shouldn't be insulted as 'stupid' for evicting Churchill, who was inspirational in the fight against Hitler, but who proved less than inspirational as a peacetime leader.

The site says the winning price was $336? (Which presumably includes buyers premium which you would have known about before bidding). However, to go from there to $431 seems very harsh. Did they mention all those charges in the small print or could you challenge them on it?

Mines closed steadily from the late 60s onwards as other sources of fuel became available. But only in 1984-1986 were they closed by violent confrontation between the miners and the forces deliberately unleashed by the government of the day.

Oops. That's a download. Now deleted to be on the safe side...

I think you would gain far more from being an acknowledged expert in your chosen field than a marginal gain in scarcer varieties would cost you (as you're possibly the first to this, you can infer that there aren't a huge number of variety collectors for 1787 silver). If it was me, I'd publish and be damned, though after taking Rob's advice above.

There was no criticism! Shall we leave this here?

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100€? That's not a great deal really. And if it is truly a rare variety, then worth the gamble, especially if you're a specialist like our friend.