I, too have bought a few lunches, dinners, and breakfasts for the graders at NGC, only to have "not gradable coins"...

...come back in body bags. I've had a B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L Morgan 1884-O that I bought off an auction site, and as good as my untrained eye is, tried to match hairlines from other graded Morgans, and this one had ALOT more hairlines than those graded in MS65! I was psyched! Plus, it had a nice slight cameo on both obverse and reverse. The reverse was a good guess at MS66, if not 67, to my untrained eye. The obverse...well, she had a few scratches on her cheek, almost like bag marks, but there was one that was a bit longer, slightly deeper (alright, under a 30x it looked like a canyon on Mars!) Needless to say, my beauty got a MS62. All the same, I love the reverse of the Morgan. Then I spent about $200.00 for 7 Indian head cents. Again, Beautiful. Most you could see the diamonds, and beautiful Liberty headband. Some were slightly tarnished, so I sent them to NCS to get cleaned up. They came back as "cleaned" "whizzed" "bent", but they got slabbed as genuine from NCS. So, now I am tired of guessing at "MS" and just stick to Proofs. I sent in a 1942 proof Lincoln cent, and I was expecting PF62-64, nothing spectacular...except something spectacular DID happen! IT CAME BACK AS UNGRADEABLE because it was "COLOR ART!". I laughed, I wept, I got angry, I wanted to remember who sold me this ungradable coin, but then, for what??

I'm just sticking to my Early 60's and 1971 proofs now. No more single coin buying! I will be listing all my "body bag" ungradables on Ebay next month...things like these sell when you start the bidding off at a buck, but also tell them the tales of woe..... Hey, the're still American currency!