Red Riley

Although obviously it would have been better without the cleaning, it may be one of those coins where the damage is far less obvious in the hand than in the photograph. Whatever the situation, the cleaning of silver reduces the value far less than would be the case with a Brassoed bronze or copper coin.

Dave, I would also concur with what everyone else is saying on this thread. Hope your lad's out soon and is better for the time spent in hospital. You will need some distraction to take your mind off things from time to time but what that distraction is, only you can decide. Derek

In my defence I would say that the 'window event' happened a good many years ago when I was not actually collecting, so that may itself say that since I've become a coin collector again I am no longer interested in teenage girls sunbathing topless. And this in turn may all be used as evidence that the coin collector is in fact nerdy and whoever posted the original heading to this thread had actually hit the nail on the head by saying we are all in fact anti-social creeps! Phew! Anyway, to continue another point made above concerning coin clubs. The big problem that I have always had is that short of heading into Central London, there really aren't any within reasonable striking distance; yes, I do regularly attend Reading CC where I have a table and generally an enjoyable evening out but it is an hour's drive away and you would need to be pretty committed to attend on anything like a regular basis. My point here I guess is that there just aren't enough clubs out there to make coin collecting a more sociable activity. Whether this is due to there not being enough collectors sociable enough to found societies, or just not enough collectors in total is obviously open to conjecture.

Maybe I'm being over-sensitive here, but that seems a tad offensive. Somewhat, yes. Jews weren't even permitted to enter parliament until 1858, so why would a 17th century monarch be Jewish? You've been on the Dopelbock again Dave.

My next door neighbour's 18-year old daughter used to hide behind a bush and sunbathe topless in their garden. I discovered this one day when up a ladder painting the window frames; whilst I couldn't see her directly, the reflection in the window altered the angle and revealed all. By the time I had finished there was 1/2" of paint on the sill...

As I'm sure you know, I too am a classic car owner and there is a forum for not only my marque but also for my model. However, whilst the number of regular posters is not dissimilar to this site, the vast bulk of the traffic relates to advice on how to fix your broken tappets, replace cills, convert to bigend shells, replace the original dynamo with an alternator etc. etc. etc. You really don't have this with coins, the perfectly obvious reason being that coins are just so much less complicated than cars and the amount of discussion on varieties and general chatter is virtually nil. I think you are comparing apples with aborigine cave paintings.

Given the current ethos of the Royal Mint... you have a point.

Or you could just eat a curry and then sit on it for half an hour.

George III was in no position to object as he was in la la land for the last decade of his reign. It was reputedly the general populace who weren't over-enamoured with the Bull Head portrait, as for some reason they didn't want to see old , fat and ugly monarchs portrayed as just that. Once those shameless flatterers, the Wyons had shuffled off this mortal coil, I suspect realism returned to the coinage and in my view most up to the present day (perhaps with the exception of the Machin and Maklouf portraits of the present queen) have represented a reasonably objective view of the sitter. But the temptation to 'go for a gong' by producing a shamelessly buttered-up portrait of the sitting monarch is still there. Hence (one of the reasons!) why I believe we should bannish the monarch's head from the coinage and replace it with great (and very dead) citizens from the past who could hardly object to an unflettering depiction. Steps back and hides behind sofa...

So you're not a Buddhist then?

Were they heck! The engine was a complete disaster from top to bottom and no amount of remedial work was ever going to cure it. The back axle wasn't much better. Mine seized solid while driving, broke in half, collapsed onto the road pulling the handbrake cable with it and sending me slewing across a duel carriageway showering oil everywhere. I'm lucky I'm still here! Sounds like you had a particularly bad one Derek - the archetypal BL "Friday afternoon" job. Though according to Wikip the surviving examples run particularly well having had the endemic problems ironed out by owners upgrading parts to the level BL should have adopted in the first place. It really isn't true. The engine was so poor it really needed replacing with a Rover/Buick V8. I covered 25,000 expensive and headache strewn miles in my Stag. There is a large industry devoted to keeping Stags on the road and so you would expect them to say something along the lines of; '... with care, the original engine can be made a reliable and long lived unit'. It's balderdash. The engine was, is and will always be rubbish. The car was being developed at the time of the BL merger and early on in the story, Lord Stokes gave the Triumph engineers a Rover V8 saying 'see if you can make this fit'. After a couple of weeks they came back and said it was impossible. Soon after launch, when it had become clear that the 2997 Triumph V8 was a lemon, what was the first mod the aftermarket industry industry offered? You've guessed it. BL? Tsk.

Curiously I bought a shilling like that on e-bay a couple of years ago but returned it as a forgery. The strange thing however is that the obvious metal to use as a base is copper and there's no sign of that coming through. I've seen some odd results on coins that have been recovered from shipwrecks. Does asnybody have a note of the weight these things are supposed to be as that should point us somewhere in the right direction?

Were they heck! The engine was a complete disaster from top to bottom and no amount of remedial work was ever going to cure it. The back axle wasn't much better. Mine seized solid while driving, broke in half, collapsed onto the road pulling the handbrake cable with it and sending me slewing across a duel carriageway showering oil everywhere. I'm lucky I'm still here!

No, it's black!

Perhaps this is one of those cases where 'the gospel according to the Daily Mail' is correct. There is no reason to suppose that one generation should be any more intelligent than another and therefore the fact that the average for university entrance in 1972 was DDE and is now AAB (or whatever) would surely point towards grade inflation. No axe to grind, but it does seem like common sense.

You would probably need your own oil well. Somebody above mentioned Stags. I had one late nineties/early noughties. Lovely styling and sound superb but required a bottomless pit of money. Nothing was built to last and it began to seriously erode my capital, so sadly had to sell and bought a big brute of a Riley 2 1/2 litre saloon instead. Built like a tank, weighs a ton and a half and very much made to last. Will do nearly the ton but might take 5 miles to stop and at 17 miles a gallon... Sorry, didn't mean to hijack this thread. I just lit the blue touchpaper and retired!

It is probably a combination of all the things mentioned topped by a few very rich individuals who know nothing but have money burning a hole. They will of course be advised by others who claim to be experts and see a percentage in it for them. Being a boring old git I remember the same thing happening in the classic car market in the late 80s, the prices of Astons and Ferraris went through the roof and inevitably crashed spectacularly a couple of years later. Famously, Lord Brockett tried to recoup his money by torching the lot and claiming the insurance. He was however found out and spent some time at Her Majesty's Pleasure. Meanwhile, us lowly Riley owners were scarcely touched by it all, a Grade 1 RME being catalogued at £3,600 before and after the shenanigans. The moral is I guess, stay away from the top end of the market until those with a surfeit of cash over brains have come a cropper. At that point there should be a few bargains to be had even if a few prime specimens will have mysteriously melted in a fire.

Or conceivably; 'we've been taking so much stick over the price of this that we thought we'd better lie low for a while' I suppose we can hope.

I would take these figures with a pinch of salt. If they were arrived at after a survey of coins in circulation, the accuracy would depend on the date at which the survey was done. The reason? Our fathers and grandfathers removing them from circulation as they 'may be valuable one day'. You only have to look at e-bay to see how many are still out there waiting for collectors to buy them - hundreds of thousands maybe. I was inspecting every penny I could get my hands on from 1969 to 1971 and didn't see any, not one! Clearly a survey conducted in 1920 would be more accurate than one in done in 1970, so if this was performed closer to the latter date than the former, you will need a great deal of help from your condiment set.

That hasn't been my experience recently. A lot of coins I see at auctions have been cleaned (more often dipped than polished) and the prices have always been pretty high to be honest. The auction houses seldom mention 'cleaned' unless it's patently obvious (even then...!). Yes, a nicely toned coin with original surfaces will go for more but the gap is narrowing and the proportions which have seen the dreaded Silver Dip is getting higher.

You're right Dave. On the occasions where I have lodged a complint against a seller, I have always won.

There is certainly nothing here to disagree with. I have however come across some disreputable sources, usually rogue e-bayers who try to pull the wool over the buyer's eyes and then point to e-bay's default 'no returns accepted' but thankfully they are in the minority.

I should see a doctor if I were you.

Yes, but this applies to virtually all coins. The bun Britannia looks er... less than attractive in close up. Better to concentrate on some of the more robust physical features, my favourite being the particularly buxom Britannia in the 1825-60 copper series. As the art historian Robert Hughes said (of Goya's La Maja) 'one could imagine climbing into the picture and having a really great afternoon'. Mind you, she could do some serious damage with that trident of hers...

You're welcome. Let's hope that Derek (RedRiley) drops by as he wrote the book on the subject (1797 on). Better late than never. I would give the 1746 an overall NVF and the 1757 F based largely on a less than perfect reverse.