Revenant

Yeah... that implication occurred to me after I made the post. 🤣😅 I felt a bit silly for it in hindsight, but they say that is 20/20. Lol Edit: There. I've made changes to the title and added a banner image to make it clearer!

I keep a 10-coin tube of 1 oz silver Buffalo rounds at my desk and mess around with them sometimes when I'm (rarely) not trying to make something work or personal happen.

There's some truth to, "not all plastic is created equal." It just happens that toys tend to made of cheaper plastic that will degrade - but it is cheaper than longer-lasting plastic like what NGC used in these slabs I have from 1993 that are still going strong. Lol

So I have a bunch of these old collectable miniatures that I used to play with in Junior High and High School. My sons get to slowly play with (and destroy) some of dad's ol "Robot toys" but I hold back some old special ones that were my favorites. A guy in a Facebook group was looking to buy some that I had some spares of - even unopened from back in the day - So I offered to sell and maybe get a few bucks towards a coin or note purchase. I have an open one too and he asked if it was still clickable/ playable. I tried and it was almost completely seized so I tried to pop it off to loosen it and... this happened. Yeah... it isn't supposed to come apart... quite like that. So I told him this and sent him the pic. I can't promise the unopened ones will click because they're unopened but there's your fair disclosure. But I told him if he was still interested in the other two then send the cash and he was still interested. This got me thinking and joking with my wife about the fact that these things just were not made to last forever - even a bulletproof vest expires after like 5 years. These things were made with cheap plastic and cheap adhesive and cheap paint and they are now 15-20 years old... and that thought stopped me dead in my tracks. The minis are 15-20 years old. It has been 15-20 years since I was that kids that spent my weekends in game stores... Wow. It is a bizarre and disquieting thing to watch bits of your childhood crumble and decay. But yeah... plastic embrittlement can definitely be a thing. I used to have a whole bunch of old plastic handled utensils that my older bother and I used all through our college dorm days but they're almost all gone now - the plastic handles all just snapped one by one and now I'm stuck with 1 oddball knife with all my stainless steel "adulty" silverware. But, hey! I scored about $40 after costs for something I don't use or particularly "value" anymore. Most of these things are going to be slowly destroyed and broken by my sons, but it is nice to recover some value from some of them all these years later where I can and use that to fund newer interests.

As a Chemical Engineer, material aging is an interesting thing to look at. I'm actually going to be writing / posting soon about something involving plastic embrittlement that got a little comical.

Well, there is a reason why I put those caveats in there. As far as formaldehyde and off-gassing goes, that's normally something that will occur for a certain period of time - a couple of years, slowly, I think - and then it drops off as the amount of residual formaldehyde is depleted. Not that I think anyone wants to buy a cabinet and spend the next 3 years letting it air out before they use it.

Yeah. I'm seriously thinking I'm going to get a 5-8 coin glass top case and put some 100-140 year old European gold in there.

Just my 2 cents, but, if you're keeping slabbed coins in an appropriate wall display cabinet - which is to say the materials the wall cabinet are not off-gassing with stuff that will corrode or color the coins - and you leave the cabinet closed most of the time in an air conditioned space / house then you should be fine. The slabs will severely limit air exchange with the surroundings and the cabinet will further limit it. So unless the space is overly hot and or humid- which is bad for copper and manganese brass keeping color - I doubt you'd have a problem. Any change is likely to be very slow unless the coins already had a chemical or toning agent on them.

Admit it... you just like making things harder on yourself.

I've seen these. Does the lid stay up well / easily to display the coins? I'd been leaning towards something with a glass window for the lid so I could be sure I could actually see the coins in the case. That had me seriously thinking about this Lighthouse case.

For me the appeal of more would be having similar size gold coins from about the same period from a bunch of different European powers from the turn of the 19th/20th century - Pre-WWI basically. Because this would basically be what I'm building with these coins and what I'd like to represent down the road as a custom set. What's amazing to me is that there were a bunch of these essentially interchangeable European gold coins circulating around that time where the Swiss 20F, the French 20F, and the Italian 20L all had about 0.1867 toz of gold in them and then the British sovereign and the Prussian 20 Mark were a little beefier at about 0.23 toz. But, with those countries where a Franc and a Lire were essentially equivalent in this period you had a de facto international unified currency, through gold, 100 years before the Euro. And that makes these coins very very cool and interesting to me, but more on this later.

I think Moody's and most of the miners are assuming $1500 as the price it settles at for the "new normal," but even if they are right it'll move around and you may see a 14-handle. I guess we'll all see. If we see $1400 my gold stocks in Robinhood will be hurting but I may be happy regardless.

I'm not buying much, but, as my recent posts indicate, I am buying and I do see this current pullback as a possible near-term opportunity. I haven't really bought much gold in the last year, I think since around Feb or March 2020, because of the spike up in prices until my anniversary present and now the 20 Lire. Even with the dip in prices its a bit rough to be buying any gold out there because premiums on things that are near melt have spiked. I don't know if gold is currently bottoming as some think or if it is going to keep going down. I do think, long term, it will be higher, but that's just my 2 cents. And, of course, we both use old gold coins for avatar images.

So work did come through with a bonus this year - smaller than last year but still a very nice surprise considering I wasn't expecting anything. So rather than making me wait to see what happens in Washington the wife let me order an NGC MS64 1882 20 Lire coin last night. I won't post pictures or anything because the seller watermarks their images but I'll be looking forward to getting the coin - hopefully sooner than their shipping estimate suggests - 2 weeks from California to Texas is a bit slow these days. If the circus on the Eastern seaboard produces something I might be going for a Prussian 20 Mark soon too... That would be fun!

Of course, now I find this and I'm very intrigued. It's a lot like a small shot glass cabinet my wife gave me several years ago. But I'm worried it might be too much / over kill. I agree that a small display with a few coins on a theme would be really great, and that was my original idea. Other than NCLT I'm not sure I have enough slabbed coins with a common theme to make something like this big cabinet work and I think the size and number of coins might actually make it lose "punch." Of course, my wife tells me she thinks it is overkill and she doesn't like it! I think that means. "it's dead, Jim."

Today marks 2 weeks hence and we still have a hole in the ceiling. Hoping they'll get back out and fix it soon but the insurance / adjuster is slowing things down. With the latest cold spell I'm not looking forward to the gas bill after having this hole in our insulation for so long but what can ya do? We're gonna be fine soon enough - just mildly inconvenienced in the long run. Thanks!

I both love and hate you for this thread...

Well said.

The value of those coins is probably about 50-90% the fact that they have a 70 on the label and not a 69. Their market value has almost no connection to the spot price of silver. Now, a MS69 graded 2021 Silver Eagle is a very different animal and it could easily be (and has been) pushed up by the Reddit Raid and the squeeze, which has pushed up premiums on physical metal. Is now the time to sell? I know nothing about MS70 or PF70 quarters but personally I'm not selling my silver NCLT yet.

This. Exactly. They've been saying it continuously at least since I got back into collecting coins in 2008.

If you know a category/ set type a coin might appear in you could look at those sets to see if someone shows one. I've actually had people message me through the registry and offer to buy a coin off me that they saw in one of my sets. They actually got the coin since it became apparent that it was worth more to them than to me. Lol But... yeah, per Ali's response, it'd be creepy if someone could just search a cert # and see if someone has it registered or search for a type of coin (denomination/year/mintmark/grade) and see who all has one listed. I could see a lot of people not liking that one bit- especially if it turned up registered coins not included in any public sets.

I'd say it's almost guaranteed to happen at this point. It's more an issue of timing. Part of this is that I want the 20 L coin to be part of whatever form this takes as well. I survived having a premie in the NICU for 2 months, so it's going to take more than a few cold days without power to fully strip my sense of humor on a more long-term basis.

It can be - but there are also $2,000 a piece studio strobes used in portraiture that I'd love to own. I find that strobes can be expensive but always-on lighting (often called "hot lights") tend to be cheaper. You probably use hot lights more for coin photos - as do I - because it's easy to get a good image of a coin when you can actually see the lighting and luster you're gonna get. Strobes tend to suck for coins.

Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't you still curb-stomping the competition in the Wilhelmina 10G category? Seriously love that set. Makes me jealous but I'm not touching Wilhelmina until I get finished with Papa's set and get a few more type coins I want. Seriously, Gary, I know you don't do this to "compete" per se but I think you do just fine in some areas. 👍

I use Photoshop creative cloud for editing all my photos - my portraiture of family and my wife, my mini / macro shooting and my coins. It has more power for general use than elements but it costs me $10.81/month after tax and I don't know that I'd give up elements if I could have it without a monthly fee. I can sometimes save a photo with photoshop but it's usually better and easier to just take a good photo in the first place. With coin photography, it seems that either the detail and the luster is there or it isn't. Very little in between.