Work has had me crazy this week but I wanted to steal a few minutes and share something fun.

My Venezuela submission took a few more days than I normally see as typical to go from just "Received" to being able to see the list of the coins. When the coins did come up I saw some variety information that I hadn't had had been entered in.

Notably, one of the coins I sent in was the non-magnetic, non-steel, zinc-aluminum version (2001-2004) and not the steel version (2000-2002).

I had not even thought to check this or test this personally. All of the other coins that I had from that batch / date range from those lots I bought from my Ukranian dealer were dated 2004. So they were after the date range of the steel versions and they had to be zinc-aluminum. So, In that context, it makes perfect sense that the 2002 10Bs were also zinc-aluminum and not the steel version - where there was such a version. Interestingly, it doesn't look like the 50B version had a zinc version. Those appear to have been steel consistently. Same thing for the 100B coins from 2001-2004.

So I'm thinking the seeming delay might have been because they had to research these a little or look them up to see what and how to enter them in.

This might seem like an odd thing to say but I'm almost more excited about the Italian coins than the Venezuelan coins this time because the Italian coins will be mostly completing established sets and they won't be much work. On the other hand, I have a lot of buying, searching, submitting, and writing to do before I can honestly say the Venezuela set is complete and I just don't even know how it's going to happen. If you can find these things for sale in MS at all you don't see a lot of listings saying if the coin is magnetic or not. How am I going to try to hunt these varieties in the wild.

I'm more or less "on-hold" with building out that custom set for the Venezuela coins because, with how custom sets get built on the NGC side, it will be far easier for me to build the set if I just wait and enter the coins in as I build the slots. It really is jarring to me some days just how different things are for custom sets on the PMG vs NGC side. It was quite easy on the PMG side to build out empty slots for notes I didn't have yet but on the NGC side it feels quite awkward. I don't know if this is bias from being used to / accustomed to the PMG side or what.

Also, now I can't help but wonder: The Magnetic nickel-clad-steel 10B is 2.33 grams. The non-magnetic zinc aluminum 10B is 1.74 grams. So if they have a reasonably accurate scale they could have told the difference by weighing it, but I just have this visual in my head now of them touching a magnet to it (through the flip to not scratch it, of course) to see if the coin responded or not.