JKK

A year and a half later they're still pushing it. They dropped the price to $800.

That last is a perfect summary of one of our greatest problems around here: People who have known a lot for so long they can no longer conceive of not knowing a lot. They can see only their own perspectives. The idea of not knowing the proper color of a penny is too alien for them to contemplate; thus, anyone who doesn't must surely be illogical, not too bright, etc. Never mind that, unlike mint errors and mechanical doubling and parking lot damage, the color issue is a little more advanced knowledge because it comes not just from seeing pennies, but examining them with a critical eye. Most people out in society have seen a lot of pennies, but few examine them. What is obvious to them, they figure, must automatically be obvious to even the rankest beginner. There is probably a philosophical or psychological term for this inability to see other perspectives, but I'm neither a psychologist nor a philosopher.
Obviously, there are degrees of this. Coin color might be at the high newbie level of understanding. Parking lot damage seems to me pretty easy to diagnose, given that most people have found a penny in a parking lot. Doubling is toward the high end of newbie. Phantom dates and lettering are toward the low, given that they seem to be triggered by a lot of reallywannaseeit (aka pareidoilia, or however it's spelled). Non-numismatic critical thinking will tend to dispose of the low-end ones, such as "I think this is a quarter struck on a nickel planchet." Research and self-education will also help, but for people to get worked up about those, they have to hang around long enough to care. Even then, not all research is created equal. That presented on YT is so consistently awful that "I researched it on YT" is like announcing "I think my proof coins look better with thumb prints."
This intellectual myopia exists in many areas. It's much like the chemistry professors forced by their jobs to teach freshman chemistry, and doing an awful and cruel job of it, because they would rather be dealing with grad students and research. It's this way with many techies: they can fix it, but if you want them to teach you how to fix it yourself, they can't because the idea of not knowing is beyond their recent experience. It's a human tendency.

The way to use graphics of varieties, in my experience, is relatively. By that I mean subtle variations in angle, direction, and distance. Let's imagine you're looking at the images ldhair posted, very helpful. What stands out the most by itself? Not the thickness; that only stands out comparatively, as in the images side by side. But look at the shaft of the 2 and compare. On the large date, it is straight. On the small date, it is more curved. So if you're just looking at pennies with a magnifying glass, you'd aim at that. If it hasn't got that curve, you can stop looking at that coin; you have your answer. In all variety hunting situations, and some others (notably authentication of frequently faked stuff), I look for a diagnostic that simply must be present.
Sometimes the variance is "the letters on this one aim directly at such and such" or "the point of the wing aims directly at the W," etc. Once you get your diagnostic right, you won't be confused any more. And yes, it's okay to do it with magnification. You don't grade with mag, but you do assess other factors.

I was thinking of heating up all their coins, then forcing them to swallow them.

The way to use graphics of varieties, in my experience, is relatively. By that I mean subtle variations in angle, direction, and distance. Let's imagine you're looking at the images ldhair posted, very helpful. What stands out the most by itself? Not the thickness; that only stands out comparatively, as in the images side by side. But look at the shaft of the 2 and compare. On the large date, it is straight. On the small date, it is more curved. So if you're just looking at pennies with a magnifying glass, you'd aim at that. If it hasn't got that curve, you can stop looking at that coin; you have your answer. In all variety hunting situations, and some others (notably authentication of frequently faked stuff), I look for a diagnostic that simply must be present.
Sometimes the variance is "the letters on this one aim directly at such and such" or "the point of the wing aims directly at the W," etc. Once you get your diagnostic right, you won't be confused any more. And yes, it's okay to do it with magnification. You don't grade with mag, but you do assess other factors.

The way to use graphics of varieties, in my experience, is relatively. By that I mean subtle variations in angle, direction, and distance. Let's imagine you're looking at the images ldhair posted, very helpful. What stands out the most by itself? Not the thickness; that only stands out comparatively, as in the images side by side. But look at the shaft of the 2 and compare. On the large date, it is straight. On the small date, it is more curved. So if you're just looking at pennies with a magnifying glass, you'd aim at that. If it hasn't got that curve, you can stop looking at that coin; you have your answer. In all variety hunting situations, and some others (notably authentication of frequently faked stuff), I look for a diagnostic that simply must be present.
Sometimes the variance is "the letters on this one aim directly at such and such" or "the point of the wing aims directly at the W," etc. Once you get your diagnostic right, you won't be confused any more. And yes, it's okay to do it with magnification. You don't grade with mag, but you do assess other factors.

Here's the logic. The longer the thread gets, the harder it is to keep track of which coin one is talking about. Thus, the request of one per thread. It is perfectly fine and normal to start a brand new thread to post a coin and ask questions. And yes, if you have ten coins, and that means posting ten threads, very well.

Here's the logic. The longer the thread gets, the harder it is to keep track of which coin one is talking about. Thus, the request of one per thread. It is perfectly fine and normal to start a brand new thread to post a coin and ask questions. And yes, if you have ten coins, and that means posting ten threads, very well.

I was thinking of heating up all their coins, then forcing them to swallow them.

The problem with that is if the thread gets longer, no one wants to keep scrolling all the way up to pick out which coin they're talking about. People like me, who have very quick 'don't bother' thresholds, simply close it and let someone else deal with it. So you get more help, more quickly, if you create separate threads.
Also, your wife's right. Truth with the bark on: You're about to learn that a lot of what you think are valuable errors are just damaged or defective (in ways that add no value). You will have achieved a great deal if you find a single piece worth $10. So instead of thinking this might be the coin that hits the big one, think none of them are worth more than face, and seek to learn how to eliminate damaged and defective coins from your consideration. Trust us: If you have one that's really a valuable error, we will say so. It gets really fatiguing breaking the news to people that their coins aren't special, and someone with their hopes way up makes it harder. But go ahead and post them by all means; the clearer and sharper the photos, the easier it will be to explain why if there were that much free money rolling around in the currency system, more people would be doing this. You'll learn what is and what isn't.

It's an S, for San Francisco, and the S mint mark normally looks that way.

I was thinking of heating up all their coins, then forcing them to swallow them.

these are the types of people  you want to nail upside down by their scrotum ..............just say'n .......  of course if you catch'em you can always toss them in the Hog pin and no one will ever find them again.

Then send it in for grading, macho man, and let's see what the services say.

It's PMV: post-mint vandalism.

It's PMV: post-mint vandalism.

With sending stuff in for professional grading, my counsel is to ask yourself what is the desired result. Broadly speaking, is it profit or hobby? If it's profit, you have to think you're increasing its value by $60 or more, or that its value is worth confirming. Obviously, if the coin is only worth a fraction of the grading cost, the profit motive is probably mistaken. If it's hobby, there could be many reasons: you're doing a fully slabbed collection, you just want to be sure it's real or a certain variety, you are assembling a registry set, your grandfather gave it to you and you like it, whatever. All hobby reasons are valid because they don't require the math to work out to a financial benefit.

With sending stuff in for professional grading, my counsel is to ask yourself what is the desired result. Broadly speaking, is it profit or hobby? If it's profit, you have to think you're increasing its value by $60 or more, or that its value is worth confirming. Obviously, if the coin is only worth a fraction of the grading cost, the profit motive is probably mistaken. If it's hobby, there could be many reasons: you're doing a fully slabbed collection, you just want to be sure it's real or a certain variety, you are assembling a registry set, your grandfather gave it to you and you like it, whatever. All hobby reasons are valid because they don't require the math to work out to a financial benefit.

If a post's title is of no interest, anyone with any maturity will just pass it by. Not everyone here is that mature. We have at least one person, around whom their world absolutely revolves, who finds it necessary to post to tell people they are not interested in the poster's coin or question. As the millennials used to say, totes brills. But that's not malice, just narcissism.
The smart way to title the post is to summarize the coin and the question. "1880 Liberty dollar grade and value" is beautiful, for example, because that's what a novice might be able to tell about an 1880 Morgan. Whether they called it a Morgan, or even knew of the possibility of a mint mark, is beside the point because the information is enough for people to decide whether to look--and they can post to clarify the coin's attribution when they offer a grade and value estimate.
Sometimes it's hard to know that much. I'm mainly into ancients and Islamic world stuff, and I don't scoff at someone who posts a jital and says "can't identify Arab coin." (Jitals mostly contain some Arabic -script but are from the region of Afghanistan, which is not Arabic-speaking.) Or someone who's got a common worn fourth-century ant of Constantius (good for me as a sleep aid; if I see one more I'll become narcoleptic) and titles it "Ancient Greek coin." People mislabel tokens as coins all the time in titles. If people would use their brains, they'd see that the poster in those cases is trying their best with what they can see. Of course they have no f-bombing idea it's not Greek. That's why they asked! And it takes some guts to risk being wrong. So those are never a downside, at least in my mind. They tried. Add something about what they want, such as "please identify" or "worth much?" and the title is golden.
The dumb way is to just say N000Bzz PLZ HELP as the title, or something else that tells us very little except that their writing is probably agonizing to make out. That tells us we are dealing with someone who does not bother to see the world from our perspective, raising the question whether we should bother with them (some Good Samarican always will). They'll probably post one of the famous forty-line paras with no punctuation. They'll nearly always have pareidolia (fancy word for wishful thinking; wishful vision, if you will). They'll argue with us, threaten to have it graded and prove us wrong (that'll fix our little red wagons). They write like children and they behave like children, but get angry when treated like children. Some even bring race into it, as if we had any idea whether they were white, black, Asian, Hispanic, or blue with pink dots. Or cared.
Basically, what do you think you have, and what do you want to know. "1964D Lincoln DDO?" is fine, because at least that means when we answer to tell them that it's just mechanical doubling, and that when you post a pic of the reverse the term would be 'DDR' if that were in play, we knew what it was about and had a question to answer.

While one doesn't grade with magnification--at least not up to MS or PF-68--one does authenticate and assess cleaning with it. One major tell is when the coin is too bright for its level of wear, especially when it's the same on the worn parts and the protected areas. Another is tiny scratches, either horizontal (handheld wire brush side to side) or circular (dremel tool rotary wire brush). Mag can also show areas of dip residue, for example. I hit it with a 60x coin microscope and can usually tell when it's been whizzed. Also a good tool for spotting varieties.

While one doesn't grade with magnification--at least not up to MS or PF-68--one does authenticate and assess cleaning with it. One major tell is when the coin is too bright for its level of wear, especially when it's the same on the worn parts and the protected areas. Another is tiny scratches, either horizontal (handheld wire brush side to side) or circular (dremel tool rotary wire brush). Mag can also show areas of dip residue, for example. I hit it with a 60x coin microscope and can usually tell when it's been whizzed. Also a good tool for spotting varieties.

While one doesn't grade with magnification--at least not up to MS or PF-68--one does authenticate and assess cleaning with it. One major tell is when the coin is too bright for its level of wear, especially when it's the same on the worn parts and the protected areas. Another is tiny scratches, either horizontal (handheld wire brush side to side) or circular (dremel tool rotary wire brush). Mag can also show areas of dip residue, for example. I hit it with a 60x coin microscope and can usually tell when it's been whizzed. Also a good tool for spotting varieties.

Posts don't have to contain questions. However, if you post a coin without a question, and no one comments--which would be pretty normal with parking lot damaged modern stuff--that would be because those who looked at it didn't think you needed any input. Speaking just for me, if I were to see your original post in the feed, I'd say: "Reeded edge. Dime. Means nothing to me." But that wouldn't mean you did anything wrong, just that it doesn't fit my personal interests.
Now, if you posted one like that, and twenty minutes later posted again ragging on us for not giving you an instant reply, that'd be different. But you did not do that. You'd be amazed how many people think they can just post a pic with no explanation, and that we'll all look at it immediately and then use our psychic powers to divine what the poster wants to know. I just block people who do that, as I just block anyone who in my view is an insufficiently_considerate_or_intelligent_person.

Posts don't have to contain questions. However, if you post a coin without a question, and no one comments--which would be pretty normal with parking lot damaged modern stuff--that would be because those who looked at it didn't think you needed any input. Speaking just for me, if I were to see your original post in the feed, I'd say: "Reeded edge. Dime. Means nothing to me." But that wouldn't mean you did anything wrong, just that it doesn't fit my personal interests.
Now, if you posted one like that, and twenty minutes later posted again ragging on us for not giving you an instant reply, that'd be different. But you did not do that. You'd be amazed how many people think they can just post a pic with no explanation, and that we'll all look at it immediately and then use our psychic powers to divine what the poster wants to know. I just block people who do that, as I just block anyone who in my view is an insufficiently_considerate_or_intelligent_person.

Not sure how it is where you're at, but my experience in three different places has been that once the dealer knows you as a regular, and that you consistently pay with something other than a credit card (the fee can really cut into their margins, especially on stuff near melt), you are likely to start getting better deals.
How those relate to the red book, I don't know. Dirty secret: I've never owned one. But I do get Coin World magazine, and I find its values to be on the high side. So if that's what the dealer is charging, on my first visit or two, I might pay that, and might make sure I always bought at least something, just to establish some optimism on the dealer's part. But then if I came on a bigger shopping trip, I might ask if there were anything s/he could do for me, and see what the dealer said. I typically get about 20% off the marked prices with established dealer relationships. Of course, if even one time we negotiated that, having not talked about payment methods, and then I stupidly whipped out the plastic, that'd be a major step backward in the relationship because by then the dealer has come to make certain assumptions about my intentions, and it's up to me to keep demonstrating that I'm good business (and should therefore continue to get good deals).
A lot of finding a great dealer is learning the fine art of being a good customer. At my dealer back in Kennewick, one day they were slammed and I sort of stepped up to help a lady and her teen daughter, who were interested in the same world coins book I was looking at. I went through it and told them some specifics about pieces, including a 1787 Connecticut copper that they really liked. I ended up basically selling them about $100 worth of coins (and they paid retail). They were very happy. The dealer didn't say anything, but I also had my own haul. Most of it was silver and had not been repriced for some time (Ag having gone up quite a bit). Without a word, the dealer rang it all up at the marked prices, rather than at the 20% higher he could have legitimately asked. I understood exactly what had happened. The savings were, in effect, a commission--a nice thank-you. When the dealer likes having you around, lots of good things can come your way.