One additional piece to the 1853 "puzzle" and...

Greetings Collectors,

I drove up to Brunswick Ga. this morning to attend church with my girlfriend, grabbed a bite to eat and returned home. I have had my two boys (14 & 13) for most of the last couple weeks and did a couple trips with them as well but have been hitting the auctions piece-meal as most of my time with them have either been in the water or in the country at my dads. The older one was tired of dad already so he went home last night and I dropped Dillon off on the way outta town. When I returned a little while ago, it dawned on me that I had not checked my mailbox for Friday or Saturday so when I got in & looked, I had a great surprise.

Two coins had arrived and so for the last hour I have been trying to download & import the pics I just took, as I just got my computer back yesterday afternoon and now Vista is gone & Windows 7 installed on the new hard drive, along with another gig of memory (which brings me up to 4-gigs). Some where in the transfer of data, Adobe "Photo Shop" disappeared. Where it went, I haven't a clue. Heck, it may still be in there somewhere. It's really hard on a "computer dummy" when things change. Before all I had to do was plug in my camera and all the steps following were simple, or seemed that way since that's the way I've been doing them for quite some time. Now everything is different, but I did finally figure it out. Windows 7 snaggs the pics, and then auto-imports them to Irfanview. I'm good after that.

The two coins that came were one more piece for the 1853 mint set, a PCGS AU-53 Philly $5 Liberty & the other was my new Mercury dime. As I mentioned in a previous post this merc is a NGC MS-65 without the split bands even though they are strong & fully split "north & south" the middle set of bands are about a little over half fully split. This coin is a "blast white" full-on gem that NGC has graded 23 at this grade with 23 higher. PCGS has seen 24 at MS-65 with 17 higher. I don't have a degree in Mercury dimes although I do love the series but this seemed to be somewhat of a "scarce" coin. The first graded silver coins I bought back in the early 1990's were close to a dozen Merc's in the old PCGS "rattler" holders. I have since bought nothing but the 1st style PCGS holders such as these and at present, I'm trying to complete the entire middle set, (1934-1945) with nothing but these old rattlers. I have had to buy just a couple of the 2nd generation "old green holders" but still search all of the auction venues for those real old style slabs I don't have. The Mercury dime that just arrived is my 1st NGC Merc and boy what a beauty it is. I have the pic in my gallery already but I may change it from what I have, which is showing the entire slab to pictures showing just the coin. All of my other Mercury's are pics of the "rattler slabs" but with this NGC example I think just the coin will do.

The $5 1853-P is a an awesome coin as well and with it, I did like all my other gold gallery pics, which is just the coin only. For this post I included the entire slab.

Now I am waiting on three coins. My new 1960-D FBL Franklin got sent back to Teletrade and they have had to re-send it. And the other two coins that will hopefully get shipped Monday are two more 1853 gold coins. Both are NGC AU-58's with one being the $2.50 P-mint and I have the New Orleans $1.00 Type One on the way as well. I have to continually keep this "High" bumped up but I really have to stop for a while. (yea, right..) Actually I am so intoxicated, I forgot to mention I started a new mint set. The 1923 represents the year my maternal grandparents started their Dairy in Waycross Ga. I already owned the 1923 Peace dollar and then came this new 1923 Merc so I have been searching the auctions for the rest of the coins. Yesterday I got a great deal on what looks to be a very under-graded 1923-S Peace that is as white as the "driven snow". I only sprang for a MS-63 (big price jump at 64 & up) but looked at close to a dozen examples of each, both the MS-64 & the MS-63 and this 63 has as much detail as any 64 I saw and if it were not for the weak strike on the reverse, this coin may have attained the 65 "gem status". The word "ONE" on One Dollar is almost not even there. (not knowing the series, is that normal?) But like I said it "rocked" everywhere else. So it's on the way too. That makes 4-coins I'm waiting on.

I hope everyone had a great safe weekend and I leave you with a pic of the obverse of my new (old) 1853 $5.

Happy Collecting!

WKF