Peckris

Spot on Peck. I have never seen a slab with a space for an old coin ticket. Quite right! They should have thought of that right at the start. If any are lurking here, how about it?

I bought quite often from Colin when he was still alive. I was always happy with the service, and Colin used to add lengthy notes to the invoices in relation to my Wants list His grading could sometimes be a little on the optimistic side (and still is!) but allthough I returned a few coins, I always got a prompt refund. I'd say buy with confidence, but the CC best is in the top grades.

Rob is the man, and he's given a good answer. However the key phrase is "if you're buying at the top end of the market". If, like me, you have gradually made your focus the milled series, then only the very highest grade, rarest, patterns and some proofs, or new varieties will count. Needless to say, I don't own any such piece. As for the post-1816 milled, there's little there that would benefit from provenance - patterns, the rarest proofs of William IV and Victoria, unique items, that's about it. What seems to have replaced provenance is the TPG services. Its ironic that a slabbed coin commands more of a premium than the old-fashioned kind of provenance that floats Rob's boat and is infinitely more interesting than a plastic slab.

Robbing bar stewards. The whole banking system needs better regulated, but just like goverment, they do as they please, rip off customers with a £35 bank charge for going a £1 overdrawn, charge £30 to make an EU bank transaction, its free in Germany. Just shows how much the UK public are ripped off by banks. I read the other day Mercyn King forced the Barclays Chief out because he was'nt going freely............... There will always be complaints about bank charges until the true cost of a service is reflected in the fee structure. Nothing in life comes for free, every action in a business has a cost. If the banks would stop cross-subsidies and make people pay for services received, the cost of going overdrawn for example would drop. Everyone likes the idea of "free banking" just as everyone thinks the customer is ripped off when going overdrawn. One is just the quid pro quo for the other. The fairest solution would be for everyone who uses the banking industry to pay for their accurately costed services, but then that would mean everyone complaining because the banks are charging THEM for daring to write out a cheque, or use the cash dispenser, or make a transaction, or whatever. With no free lunch on the table - people will just moan whatever the situation. What you're forgetting though, is that we are a captive audience. The vast majority of working people, and even those on benefits nowadays, have no choice but to use the banks. None of us can opt to have our wages paid in notes and coins each week, via a brown envelope, as I understand used to be the case many decades ago. We have to be paid via banks....... ,,,,,and newsflash, banks are not user friendly. Literally every single act they perpetrate, however they dress it up, is profit driven, wholly for their own convenience, and anything but for the well being of their customers. Moreover, as far no free lunch, yes, you're right. But the up front charges of banks are out of all proportion to the real cost. The stories about people going a few pence into the red for one day, and getting stung for a £35 fee, are real. They aren't Daily Mail hype, as I can duly testify. They continue to close branches considered to be non cost effective, despite the adverse effects incurred to customers in the towns concerned. Not everybody does their banking via the internet, and need the reassurance of face to face contact, especially elderly people. Again, this is 100% based on their own convenience. They couldn't give a toss about their customers. In some places they haven't even had the courtesy to leave a free ATM. You mentioned cheques, another old fashioned valuable facility they would like to abolish for their own convenience. Fortunately this is one area where they've found themselves squashed, and the cheque, used less, but still highly useful in certain situations, will remain beyond 2018. At least it might mean that fewer tradesmen get paid in cash and thereby avoid income tax, something that will no doubt please those politicians who now seem to be regularly offering up sanctimonious lectures about tax avoidance/evasion, whilst staying strangely silent about when the billions of bailout money will be repaid to the taxpayer (this year, next year, sometime never, probably. So I say, roll on the challenger banks. Maybe they will act with more customer care principles in mind.....well, we can always hope And don't forget the £5 note shortage a few years back. It was apparently caused by the banks who hated them, as they couldn't dispense them in ATMs (minimum £10). I think customers protested long a loud about the number of coins they had to lug around because of the shortage, and maybe that's why they seem to be in ready supply again.

That does look more useful and versatile than a spreadsheet Peck. I did not even look to see if Microsoft Works has database software... It does! The templates on offer are of no use for listing coin data, but this is what it looks like blank. When I get some spare time, I will have to have a play around with it and see what I can create Great - it will only be a simple database, Access-lite, but I'm prepared to bet it's more powerful and versatile than the MS Works spreadsheet. Make sure it includes total / summary fields where you can dynamically see the running total of - e.g. - your purchase costs, latest values, etc.

You could go for specific Roman coins minted in Britain, but there's not much point unless you're specialising - they're rarer and more expensive, and anyway coins circulated throughout the Empire. The best value are denarii of the later emperors, you can pick up high grade examples for under £100. The early coppers - big beasts like the dupondius and sestertius - are quite pricey, but later, smaller bronzes can be very cheap. Especially those of Constantine, Constantius, Constans, etc. Again, high grade examples can be picked up comparatively cheap. Then there's the anoninianus - these virtually replaced the tdenarius in their cash-strapped economy, and are basically bronze coins washed with silver. Also cheap. Roman coins are nice to have, and as you've noticed, very affordable. Thanks Peck. Your post has just reminded me of something! Perhaps the coin bug seed was planted in me long ago, and has just been laying dormant, I completely forgot about this. Here is that little story When I was around 12 years old, I was browsing a boot fair with a friend. I walked past a stall that had one of those glass cabinets full of jewellery and such. Something caught my eye, it was not a shiny piece of metal, but more like a lump of dirt! Turned out it was a "Roman" coin, which I purchased for the sum of £1. I took it home and showed my parents, and asked "how can I clean it?", the advice was to stick it in vinegar! Which I did. In the morning ALL of the claggy dirt had gone, and I was left with a coin that had a nice looking portrait, and what looked like a pig feeding its young on the reverse. The next weekend, me and my friend (without permission of course), "bunked" a train to Rochester, visited the Guild Hall Museum and asked if they could tell me anything about my coin. They kindly took us into what looked like one of those posh libraries you see in films, sat us down and said "we wont be long". They came back with a little piece of paper with the details of my coin written on it, and a book with a picture of similar reverses. Turned out it was a coin dated sometime just before BC! It is a shame I can not remember the details now. The coin was tucked away, never touched again, until ebay hit the internet! I sold it for around £25-£30 if I remember rightly. I wish I had kept it now The buyer left feedback saying they loved the coin, so I guess that is some consolation, that it went to a good home. Phew!... That was a long post, like a can of Pringles, I could not stop Fascinating - I found a Julia Domna denarius in the spoil heap of an archaeological dig ("finders keepers" was the rule with spoil heaps), and I too cleaned the clag off it by soaking overnight in vinegar. Sadly as an impoverished student in the 1970s I needed cash and sold it to a dealer for £7, a good few pints back then But I have since bought a Julia Domna denarius in quite high grade so all is not lost (and the £60 I paid for it was only a tickle to me then compared with the £7 in the 1970s).

Robbing bar stewards. The whole banking system needs better regulated, but just like goverment, they do as they please, rip off customers with a £35 bank charge for going a £1 overdrawn, charge £30 to make an EU bank transaction, its free in Germany. Just shows how much the UK public are ripped off by banks. I read the other day Mercyn King forced the Barclays Chief out because he was'nt going freely............... There will always be complaints about bank charges until the true cost of a service is reflected in the fee structure. Nothing in life comes for free, every action in a business has a cost. If the banks would stop cross-subsidies and make people pay for services received, the cost of going overdrawn for example would drop. Everyone likes the idea of "free banking" just as everyone thinks the customer is ripped off when going overdrawn. One is just the quid pro quo for the other. The fairest solution would be for everyone who uses the banking industry to pay for their accurately costed services, but then that would mean everyone complaining because the banks are charging THEM for daring to write out a cheque, or use the cash dispenser, or make a transaction, or whatever. With no free lunch on the table - people will just moan whatever the situation. Yeah but no but yeah but no.. I can see that for everyday banking they have a right to recover their costs (though those costs are vastly reduced when enough people use their online services), but it's their investment arms that have caused all the trouble and mess we're in. If banks had stuck to what they traditionally did - lending money and taking deposits - there wouldn't be the issues we have with them, and apart from a bit of grumbling about charges (the way of the world!) we'd all get along fine. The trouble is that banks have become massive multinational corporations that operate across national boundaries, hold entire economies to ransom, have a significant hand in Third World poverty, and all in the name of profit. The Quakers who started Barclays and Lloyds would be spinning in their graves at the thought of the behemoth that banking has turned into. The Nationwide is more akin to what banks used to be, differing only in that it's a mutual.

These are given out by Spink with their SCBC. They're good fun. Pfft - a biit easy looking at the pieces size! now if there was a 2000 piece jigsaw of both sides of a 1933 penny..

What date, time, Peter? Do you want that in the Julian or Gregorian calendar ?

I am going to rename you Pessimeter! A true Fine 19KN would go for a few pounds, maybe even £10 - £15 on the right day on eBay, maybe half that at a fair. It would have to be pretty damn worn to only fetch 99p.

The attachment in question: Hopefully it speaks for itself!

Not a problem for me pies, I can "sort" any of the columns whenever I need to, with the click of a button!... by date, denomination, grade etc. and also by denomination + date. That is one of the good things about a spreadsheet It seems to me a great pity that databases have gone out of fashion - they are much more powerful and versatile, and unrestrained by columns and rows (unless you "convert to table" which you can do for a particular layout), you can create layouts of great beauty and elegance, with fields where you want them, drop down lists to select from and save typing, and yet still with a range of calculations and functions available, just like a spreadsheet. And you can have total fields, summary fields etc Apple Works came with a simple database - is there one in MS Works? If so, and assuming it has a good range of functions, you might find you don't need Excel. Here is an example of one of my layouts (history of Seaby/Spink values) oops, it won't let me add an attschment on a Edit - see next post

It makes you wonder if the person responsible did it hoping to creqte a future rarity? After all, in purely monetqry terms, his 1p cost him 2.5p! Unless it really was an accident, but you would wonder how on earth it could happen with all the security they must have.

You could go for specific Roman coins minted in Britain, but there's not much point unless you're specialising - they're rarer and more expensive, and anyway coins circulated throughout the Empire. The best value are denarii of the later emperors, you can pick up high grade examples for under £100. The early coppers - big beasts like the dupondius and sestertius - are quite pricey, but later, smaller bronzes can be very cheap. Especially those of Constantine, Constantius, Constans, etc. Again, high grade examples can be picked up comparatively cheap. Then there's the anoninianus - these virtually replaced the tdenarius in their cash-strapped economy, and are basically bronze coins washed with silver. Also cheap. Roman coins are nice to have, and as you've noticed, very affordable.

Good one!

There's no mystery. You have a bad day at work, find an old sixpence and lob it into the blank hopper. Et voila. The intriguing thing is that 1959 sixpences were very common in BU even up until decimalisation. It almost seems as though they minted far too many for the actual needs, and even after trickling them out gradually, theY didn't all get issued. So it's not out of the question that there was even a bag of them still around in 1983, which was three years after the humble tanner was demonetised. Just a guess of course.

Errrrrrr yes Mongo, that'S the one i'm selling :lol: :lol: Haha! Classic, Im such a duh :D Not really! Not unless you knew Dave's eBay seller name...

There are no dates on coins until Tudor times, but it's often possible to narrow down the date range from the Spink type. I'm no expert on hammered types, so someone else will have to identify yours more closely.

Economies of scale, that's why - it's easier for a mass producer to sweep up a minority producer. And Britain has never been much cop at industrial management. Finally, those marques were internationally recognised as extremely good, which is why they were easy to sell off to the likes of Ford and BMW. The same couldn't be said of Rover which turned into a disaster in the 1970s and wasn't able to be pulled back from its self-inflicted brink. I suspect we have opposing reasons for regarding the welfare state as a joke. To disabled people in Britain, it feels as if their crutches are being kicked away; this government tacitly supports all those 'scrounger' 'workshy' headlines thrown out by such as The Daily Mail, Express, and Sun, with scant regard for the actual facts and figures. The bottom line is that the 'powers that be' have decided that the current levels of disability cannot be afforded, and as a result we are a sacrifice to the Tory gods.

Hello Clive.......Thank you also for your reply, much appreciated. I am in silly old Suffolk, also fairly near the Essex Border, ie Colchester. I do feel like screaming, as I just feel so helpless and clueless. I did sit on the floor the other day and try to sort out 1 Tin of coins. I tried putting them into countries for starters, but gave up totally frustrated as I just dont know what I am supposed to be looking for......if anything! I have got a bag of around 50 maybe more of Halfpennies.......but???? what do I look for/do with them? Arrrrrrrrhhhhhhhh Just to give you an example, I am looking at a silver coloured coin(about the size of a old half crown) with CC CP OANH Py6n6? on the front and 1870-1970 and a mans head on the back. Er??? Another brown metal coin that looks a bit like Britannia on the front (very worn) say Britan NIA on one side and what looks like GEORGIVS III REX. The date is badly worn but could be 1775??? I need some Anadin quick! I could still be sitting here this time next year trying to figure some of these out! Thanks again ~ Toshgirl My dad was a Camulodunian (Colchester!) and we used to go there as kids to see the grandparents. But I spent most of my childhood on the edges of Liverpool so I'm a kind of Scouser Your copper coin is either a halfpenny (approximately the size of a 50p) or a farthing (smaller than a 10p) of George III. The "back" - reverse - is of Britannia. 1775 is quite a common date for copper, but condition is everything - in worn condition but with all details readable, a halfpenny would be worth between £5 and £10. But in EF condition it would be worth between £200 and £250. If you could post a picture of both sides, we could advise on condition. If the date is as worn as you say, it's probably Fair, and worth about £5.

I never said a good car was defined as "affordable to joe public", in fact I specifically said "not mass market" before you moved the goalposts. Derek gave you a list of marques, to which you can add Caterham, TVR, and probably some other minority but still very good marques. As for foreign owned, just because Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Jaguar, etc have been taken over by foreign owners doesn't make the cars any less British, as they are still designed and built here, we just don't see any of the profits. Land Rover may be owned by BMW, the Mini also, but that doesn't take away from the fact that the cars are designed and built here. The only mass market manufacturer we have left is Vauxhall who have been owned by General Motors since the 1920s. (Did Ford pack up their British operations?) There are EIGHT F1 teams based in Britain - that includes MacLaren, Red Bull, Caterham, Force India, Lotus, among others. Just listen to the interviews when there's a GP on. Even Ferrari use some British expertise e.g. Rob Smedley who is Massa's mechanic.

First of all, don't worry, we're a friendly lot around here and won't bite! Second, do look up bullion price of gold and silver, as that should be a guide as to what the metal value is of your dad's coins. A dealer won't pay you full whack of course (needs his profit), but if you work on a "Can you pay me 66% of bullion value?" that would be reasonable. Any Englsih silver coin dated 1946 or earlier has actual silver in - 50% to be precise. Before 1920, it's sterling silver, i.e. 92.5%. So any of those old halfcrowns, florins, etc, are worth their bullion value according to date. If it's any consolation, coins have steadily increased in popularity compared to stamps, which have fallen dramatically out of favour (hence the auctioneers' comment). Coins however always have an intrinsic metal value, but you need to know what the metal is. Most of the proof commemoratives are not worth a great deal, often just bullion value. As for the older predecimal coins, and foreign, it depends on condition and rarity. It doesn't sound like there's much there, but you could try sounding out a dealer (depends where you live, but there are coin fairs in York, the Midlands and London are the biggest). Selling individual low value items on eBay would take more of your time than would prove worth it, unless there is an item of great rarity. There are a few dealers on this forum. They might be willing to help out. Good luck.

Actually I only use Variety where there is one, e.g. LT for 1902 pennies, or H / KN, or ME, stuff like that. If there's a Freeman or Peck number I'll use that for less well known varieties. Description I use for a multitude of purposes - e.g. Lot Number (auctions), perhaps a general rarity comment, people who helped me with information about the coin, more precise details about the seller - e.g. my Midland Coin Fair drop down choice doesn't identify who the actual dealer is. As for your Spink description, I leave it in Spink (no point in duplicating that!).

Oh great, I'm just the OLD one

We still make the best cars, just not mass market. And it's no coincidence that the majority of Formula One teams are based in this country.