And the wait is driving me Crazy!!!! For a change, it?s one that someone else may want also. Up until now I've been finding VAM's in my local dealers Junk box but this time I got VERY LUCKY!!!!!!

There is nothing else that you can call it but sheer, dumb luck!! It's been one thing to find a VAM that was worth 200 or 300 dollars. With those (for the most part) I know what I've been looking for. This time I bought an 1827 Capped Bust Half Dollar from my local coin shop. I bought it because I thought he had it under graded and I sent it in on this last submission that I wrote about earlier and since I know absolutely nothing about Overton Varieties and the 1827 had 49 different documented varieties (according to the book on Overton Varieties) I figured I would spend the extra seven dollars and see if it was one. The whole idea was that with that many varieties for that year, I might have at least a decent shot at scoring with something that might be at least a little scarce. The submission is in grading now, but they have already done the Overton Attribution and posted it on the web site. This coin was attributed as an O-137 and it's an R-6 on the Rarity scale. The Overton book says that it is one of the two "very rare" varieties for this date. With that in mind I went to the Heritage Auction site and checked their archives and in 2006 they sold one that was an XF-45 for almost $14,000 with the buyer's premium. They also made reference to another one (XF-40) that sold in 2003 for $13,011. I feel like I?ve won the lottery!

I think that mine will grade out at least an XF-40. Of course that's IF it doesn't get Body Bagged. There were so many of the early Type coins that were cleaned so you never can tell but I pray to the Grading Gods that they see fit to put it in an NGC Slab all of it's very own.

It just goes to show that you never know what you will find. There are still a lot of good finds out there! For that matter you may not even know what you have in your own collection!

Mike