History&Coins

7 hours ago, Conder101 said:

 I can't say if he ever actually counterfeited other items.

If you Google Omega counterfeit coins, you'll see an ANA article which says:

"He made some ten dollar coins, as well, and 1910, 1913 and 1926 coins of this series, the symbol is also in the Omega.    The Omega Man was a very successful counterfeiter and has made hundreds of coins, some of which have probably not been found...."

The user comment on that article about "a 1909 $10 Indian bought a long time ago" is my post.  Merely out of curiosity; how can you be a "Total Newbie" with 8,360 posts?  I tend to be a slow learner too so it's not completely unexpected.

Sometime around 1982 I bought a 1909-P $10 Indian at a local coin show in New Jersey.  About 10 years later I was buying type coins for my US collection and I showed the coin to a major dealer: Clark A. Samuelson of US Coins.  I bought quite a few coins from Clark and he told me that my $10 Indian was definitely an Omega counterfeit.  Clark passed away since then and I don't have the 1981 dealer contact.  I've looked at some posts others have made about counterfeit $10 golds and looked at mine again.

It has some characteristics of a good coin.  It has 46 stars on the edge (correct for the 1907-1911 issues), the edge design was applied with 3 partitions (also correct) breaking at 6:00, 10:00, 2:00 (measured from the reverse), or 12:00, 4:00, 8:00 (obv).  The weight according to a very good analytical balance (ohaus)  was 16.754g although I think the balance is a little hi & needs calibration.  The correct weight is 16.718g although .001 gram accuracy is difficult to get even with the wind shield.

Poor photographs follow.  I took at least 15 photos with a Sony NEX6, set to manual focus (auto-focus is hopeless) to get these but I can do better as I also have a photo camera mount.  These were done by hand.

A diagnostic of the Omega counterfeits is an Omega symbol in one of the letters of "Liberty" often the "R".  This coin has something there but even looking at it with a German 9X hastings triplet I can't pick out any Omega symbol.  Also every slabbed 1909 Indian in 63 or 64 grades I looked at from HA had "not a completely clear field" inside the R of Liberty: similar to mine.

So is this an Omega counterfeit?  Is it a regular counterfeit?  In answer to the obvious, yes I do have "a few" $10 golds unslabbed, some bought from Stack's auctions back in the 80's before anyone heard of slabbing coins.  Others were bought at coin shops in the NE back in the days.  If interested I can try to get better photos of this 1909 Indian $10.

12 hours ago, BillJones said:

That 1802 dollar is graded AU-58 by PCGS, I think that is the correct grade.

That's a really nice one for the grade.  However it's also hard to grade just by looking at photos.  This pix doesn't show any wear on high points on the Bust and nice original surfaces.  However these details can change just by changing the lighting during photography.  Still a very attractive coin.

On 6/27/2013 at 9:28 AM, BillJones said:

I don't own an 1804 dollar ( NOT), but here is an 1802 which is the same general type. The piece you posted in your photo only resembles the real thing.

 

Although I'm a foreign collector I used to watch 'early type US' in the hopes of getting some some day.  Unfortunately US keeps getting more expensive so I think I'll stay in foreign forever.   I'm going to guess the 1802 dollar is an ms-62, only because of the small nick on the reverse shield. Otherwise it'd be a 63.  How far off am I?

Of course there's a limited amount one can tell from blurry pictures as well as not having the coin in hand.  Recently {well late 2018} I just bought my 1st Alexander tetradrachm.  I've been looking for the Babylon mint as well and just missed an mint state one but I did get a nice one from the Susa mint.  I need to rephoto it as happily the Gorny & Mosch  pix looks horrible compared to the original.

Your piece looks genuine to me.  It seems reasonably well detailed although beat to heck.  Note that Babylon pieces are not rare but they are much scarcer than the most common Amphiolis (spelling?) mint ones.  I don't see any problems with the color as all sorts of things have been done to these over the past 23 centuries.  I don't see any evidence of casting porosity or raised pimples.  Your weight seems good.  I don't know if a ring test works on these but one thing you can do is bring it to a pawn broker and beg him to do a couple free XRF (non destructive X-Ray flourescence spectrospcy) scans of the front & back.  I recall these as being pretty pure silver but perhaps some of the experts can fill us in.  If the coin is good silver, that goes a long way to indicating it's genuine as frankly I don't think a counterfeiter would make a piece in such beat up condition in good silver.

If you could use a bright light and perhaps get some better pictures of closeups of the obv & reverse, that might help.