Rob

This isn't the preserve of self slabbed coins. I've had a few that I wouldn't have bought had I known about the edges prior to purchase. All courtesy of the big two TPGs which p's you off a bit when you have just spent many hundreds or even a bit more. They do appear to have quality control - whereby the visible knocks get rejected and the hidden ones are slabbed, presumably on the assumption that nobody in the US would want to break out a coin. And you can't complain, because they would reply that it must have happened when you broke it out. One reason for marking down a slabbed coin.

London is always a problem, whether coin fair or auction. I stopped getting the train to London when it leapt from £95 return to £130 (pig class) and that's a few years ago. The alternative is driving, which now costs £50-60 for fuel, plus parking for the day of £30ish, plus congestion charge, plus the hassle of sitting in queues of traffic on the M1 or M40 (realistically a minimum of 4 hours each way). All that with no guarantee you will find anything suitable makes it distinctly unattractive. Cheap train fares are available - if you want to arrive in mid-afternoon. I make an effort for specific sales where I particularly want something (like next week), but avoiding going to London at all can be a very pleasurable thing.

Another problem with hammered is that the dies were less reproducibly made. If you have a full letter punch, then it is reasonable to assume that the character would be sunk into the die until the main body of the punch acted as a stop. With earlier hammered coins the letters are usually composites of lines, curves, wedges etc., using all of which are more likely to result in an end product of a less consistent depth. Then you also have the problem of worn dies, flan hardness, flan size, force applied when striking, number of strikes made or even at which mint the coin was made. The list is lengthy. Variation in any of the aforementioned will result in a different product every time. Even the waviness of the flan is down to how easy it was to remove the coins from the cutter. It seems a reasonable assumption that the coins were cut out of a sheet using something akin to a pastry cutter because you frequently find Saxon coins in mint state with a wavy flan. The only sensible explanation I have heard for this is that they were deformed trying to remove them from the cutter, because their as struck nature would exclude damage from circulation.

The problem with a price range is that the really nice example which is way better than the normal fayre will distort the figures. If you have only 2 or 3 examples available to collectors, 1 or 2 in Fine - VF and one close to mint state, then the latter will sell for multiples of the former and so set the benchmark. If you have the only lower grade coin and the best sold for say £10K, then most would expect theirs to sell for perhaps half of that without considering that most people would wait for the better one to reappear. Or, using a milled example, consider the 1667/4 half crown - 3 known, all dire, but one is less dire than the other two. People always see what they want to see which in the case of the grade applicable to their coin is over-optimistic (or nearly always so). A price range would also cause problems for insurance purposes as you would be obliged to revert to the price paid for your coins as opposed to replacement cost.

Hammered can be anything from dire to as struck (and well struck) just as milled. Grading companies tend to be in the dark when it comes to hammered. Consequently the NGC grades for example tend to be over the top. A recent US sale had a coin graded MS65 where the strike was so bad you struggled to read it. It probably was uncirculated, but only because they had difficulty identifying it as coin of the realm and stuck it in the pending tray. Strike quality is a major contributing factor with hammered - a fact they seem oblivious to. Ignore the label on hammered coin slabs and decide for yourself if the coin is evenly and well struck, nicely centred and doesn't have any cracks or splits. That is a few too many parameters for a numbers based grading system.

Can't be the same - not with 3 years between them. Can you make a scan? You can't discount the possibility that a die was used after a period of 3 years. My 1675/3/2 halfpenny was obviously intended for use over that time span, and I was hoping that the 1817 and 1820 shillings with I/S in HONI were from the same die. From the images I think it is possible they could be, but the jury is out as the 1817s are badly struck with a characteristic low rim and if it was indeed the same die it would need to have been slightly recut as the bar in H is at a slightly different angle on the two, but as we know all too well, this happened frequently. I wouldn't know where to start with image superimposition, so I am unable to confirm using this method.

According to the description it weigh's (sic) 1.5g and is 15mm from end to end. I call that a rivet. The statistics suggest a 1/3 farthing, but if genuinely 15mm from end to end, then the rivet is approximately 200mm diameter at the ends and Peter has a point. Ho ho ho - pink giant.

Thanks. Looks like it is sorted, but don't know why it happened. My youngest changed the incoming & outgoing server addresses to the same as those for the (working) private address and it worked. The same server addresses have appeared in the pop-up box for years, so don't understand why it wouldn't work now. As for ticked boxes, not guilty, because I don't do anything so radical as fiddling with computer settings.

Does anyone have a clue how to get emails to download into outlook when the server keeps rejecting login details? It gives the same error every time. 0x800CCC92 plus the message authorisation failed. Normally they get downloaded from BT automatically, but now one address works and one doesn't. True to form it's the business address that isn't working - so I can continue to purchase online pharmaceutical products via the private address , but don't receive any incoming business orders or whatever. Coincidentally, Microsoft did an update 2 nights ago.

I've often wondered why low grade (or common) coins are submitted for grading. Could it be that CGS UK give discounts for bulk submissions? Or perhaps, some people are just deluded into thinking that their coin is the best out there. They haven't necessarily been submitted by a paying customer. They slabbed some themselves to get the populations up, particularly the cheap items. Expensive coins are a different matter as you have to spend money to acquire the coin in the first place, so some of these can be reasonably assumed to be from paying customers but it would be wrong to assume that all are.

Very good Mr P

The Saxon purports to be an Eadwig floral type S1125, however, it looks a bit crude. i.e. are you sure it is genuine? It ticks all the right boxes for a type that would be copied being 1350 in fine and 5250 in VF and is the most expensive type without the bust. I would have to do a bit of digging to see if there is another example by OSWALD in a catalogue to see if the dies match. North doesn't list him as a moneyer. Provenance? Scottish is not something I know much about, so would have to dig out the literature.

The description could be wrong, but if not is incorrectly attributed. The extra leaf is found behind the bottom leaf on the LHS and is clearly not present.

I'll hazard a guess and say the first is class 10, but which sub-class I wouldn't like to commit myself. That's based on the crown detail which is bifoliate, whereas the earlier types are trifoliate. The second looks later - at a guess class 15 based on the shape of the h and the left leaning spearhead and fleurs.

I much prefer patterns with their alternative designs than say a proof of a currency type even if the sharper detail on the proof highlights the design qualities. I guess it's a variation on collecting works of art. There are many unadopted, but very attractive designs such as the 1848 Godless florin with three obverses and three reverses. The adopted obverse was the best in my opinion, but my preferred reverse would have been the quatrefoil type.

The prices are to a large extent the result of ignorance based on perception due to collectors failing to do due diligence. In many instances the prices are less than the sums paid for uncirculated currency pieces which in turn is down to the larger collector base. I think patterns are wonderful things with designs that can be artistically quite imaginative. The most I have paid for a George III copper pattern halfpenny is £1250 which compares very favourably with say the several thousand that would be required to buy an 1862 bun head halfpenny with a die letter beside the lighthouse in comparable grade - if you could find one. And if you think that is comparing chalk with cheese, the decimal patterns of the 1850s would again cost less with only a couple of very attractive and desirable pieces commanding more.

It's amazing the number of regional versions of our language..... Your wife is fluent in Englsih, GeoffT uses Englisn and Azda is fluent in ******. Brilliant.

It could be that someone put a reserve on it in advance of the sale, but when it didn't make this figure they decided to let it go to the nearest bid. It has happened to me elsewhere where I was the underbidder, but was pleasantly surprised to be invoiced at my maximum having known that the vendor had paid twice as much for the coin in the past.

Gold in top grade with no wear and only a couple of tiny marks will win hands down unless the lower grade piece is an acknowledged rarity whose supply is far outstripped by demand. Spink prices them reasonably similarly as a couple of hundred either way is not really here or there, but 1832 is flagged up as a date for counterfeits, so do some homework before you buy. PS. Why do you wink your wife in public, or is it a coded message?

So let's see, what have we got to look forward to... More riots Hunger strikes in Ireland Another pointless war a Miner's strike the Battle of the Beanfield (Dale Farm?) Deregulation of the Financial Industry More riots a nuclear disaster Stock market crash the disintegration of a superpower and the Poll Tax to wrap up the decade... I think it was Mark Twain who said History doesn't repeat itself, but it always rhymes. Do we have a closet FT reader here? Erm, weren't his initials MT ? I'm sure it is entirely coincidental, but the same aphorism appeared in last weekend's FT.

So let's see, what have we got to look forward to... More riots Hunger strikes in Ireland Another pointless war a Miner's strike the Battle of the Beanfield (Dale Farm?) Deregulation of the Financial Industry More riots a nuclear disaster Stock market crash the disintegration of a superpower and the Poll Tax to wrap up the decade... I think it was Mark Twain who said History doesn't repeat itself, but it always rhymes. Do we have a closet FT reader here?

It screams fake at you. A mint mark in the shape of a pomegranate would be a good start. It is found after MARIA on the obverse, and if present on the reverse is after VERITAS.

Okay I hold my hands up......I am an xbox gamer I have never tried Spam........is it worth a go? Bots can also be helpful in getting your rankings up on search engines Did someone mention a 1926 ME? Azda - I couldn't agree more. Spam must be fried, and your wife does have a cracking bot, as I told her yesterday. Colin. Ok, a hands free xbox. How do you control the thumb switches? As for rankings on search engines, I am totally confused. It couldn't find me in the first 26 pages of a google search for "coin dealers manchester", but did manage to find a testimonial for a laundry machine. Weird or what? I guess that must have used one of these bots to improve the ranking, but for what reason is beyond me.

Short for robot (unlike Rob ), i.e. an automatic - software - conveyer of spam without human intervention. Rob is an automated consumer of Spam (or anything else, edible or not) without human intervention, or so I have been told.

Apparently it's called a 'console', and it plays games. Oh, and it fails often and spectacularly. Made by Microsoft. That's about all *I* know. Know all........ I'm still underwhelmed though.