It is Day 13 of our Coronavirus Self-solation. Frequent walks help make it not so bad with the stir craziness now. We’re taking the cars for short drives and driving out to the woods to walk around so that the cars don’t sit idle for too long.
I thought it was a good day to have a bit of fun.
A few years ago I ended up with two graded 1883-O Morgans in my collection. One is an NGC MS63 that I bought. One is a PCGS graded AU58 that another member here gave me when I bought a coin off them in the marketplace and it took a long time for them to get it in the mail so they sent me that AU58 too just to be nice.
I’ve often thought about cracking that AU58 out of the slab because… it’s a circulated common-date Morgan. It’s not like the slab increases the value any and if I crack it out it can go in an album page and take up less room.
Anyway. I decided today was the day. I was going to ask Ben to ‘help’ me and we were going to go for it.
The nice thing about making a PCGS graded coin the victim is that it helps keep him from thinking he can take a hammer to the NGC coins... I hope.
The thing is… I’ve always heard people talk about how easy it is to crack these slabs open and how it just takes a ‘couple of quick taps’ and yadda yadda. Except… We couldn’t get it open. And we hit that sucker hard a few times, on the edge and on the face. It didn’t break. It wasn't just the four year old hitting it! I hit it too! It suffered some clear physical damage, but it’s still together.
This result in a number of ways makes sense to me. I was always confused by all the stories about how easy these are to break. It didn't make sense for something made for archival protection to be so easy to break - especially given the likelihood of drops. Still, I'm having trouble reconciling the stories I've heard with this experience.
The children's show on the TV is called "Word Party." Ben loves it... I'm not sure why.
This has honestly given me some new respect for the slabs. I have that thing a couple of pretty solid whacks on the edge. I would not have expected it to hold up that well. I’ve dropped these things on the floor a few times and nearly had a heart attach worrying they’d break because of what I’ve heard. But this? Wow.
So… what am I missing here? Is there supposed to be a mystery-just-right way to ‘tap’ these open?
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