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Conder101

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Everything posted by Conder101

  1. The date of the first letter is almost exactly a year before the gold that arrived at the mint which was made into the 1848 CAL quarter eagles. the gold that made the proclamation of "gold in California" official. Even though that shipment was less than a third the size of the one in the OP letter. 2 weeks? Try 3 to 6 months. Three if you took it to Panama, carried it across the country and then got on board another ship. Six months if you sent it around the tip of South America. Even overland by stage could take a month and a half to reach St Louis where you could board a train and go the rest of the way in about a week. Couldn't ship by train, transcontinental railroad wasn't completed until 1896. Pony express? Didn't exist until 1860, and the pony express didn't carry freight. What they carried were documents, contracts and other important papers, usually written on onion skin paper to save on weight. The rate was $5 for 1/2 oz. 1 oz of Cal gold was worth about $16. It would cost $10 to ship it to St Louis, and then extra on to Philadelphia.
  2. Yes it would be good if all the newbie read it before posting their discoveries. Unfortunately almost none of them will. And for those that do, most will still be overcome by rose colored glasses and dreams of dollar signs.
  3. More power to you, just understand that it is EXTREMELY unlikely to happen. Oh and there ARE 1942 cents out there that have been overstruck with fake "soft die" 1943 dies. And of course the Chinese counterfeiter have fake dies for various dates including 1943. Nothing stopping them from making a fake copper 1943 struck over another dated cent.
  4. There is a visual search engine app for coin identification called Coinoscope. You download and install the app on your smartphone, then take a picture of the coin and it searches the net for it and returns a list of possibles. It isn't perfect, but it gets you in the neighborhood.
  5. The San Francisco mint had been closed for 7 years. I seriously doubt the mintmark punch was laying there on the desk where it could be accidently picked up and used. Most likely it was packed away somewhere. Why keep a tool around for a mint that was closed nad not expected to reopen.
  6. Or if they were actually given as gifts, then Roosevelt would have had to pay for them. SOMEBODY had to pay, the metal had to be accounted for and the books had to balance.
  7. Hey, he was one of the ones piling on before he became Director. Now he knows how his predecessor felt.
  8. I saw the story back in 2001 when the stuff from the box first started showing up including the other two reverse quarters.
  9. First picture the top portion of the inscription says "was struck in", the bottom word, the one than looks like it has two b's in it, is Constantinople. So it is Turkey. Below Constantinople is the AH date in Arabic numerals 1294. That is the date the ruler came to power.To get a rough AD date multiple by .97 and add 622. You get 1876. As mentioned the second picture is upside down. The central portion is called a toughra and was a stylised form of the Sultan's signature. Below it is "manat" (year) and the year of the rulers reign. In this case year 27. So the year of the coin is roughly 1876 + 27 = 1903.(Actually it's 1901) Composition is silver, and the denomination from the size 1 Kurush. The little inscription by the toughra is El Ghazi "The Victorious". Catalog number is KM735.
  10. Not with star 6 pointing directly at the tip of the coronet. It is also small stars, not large stars, and it's N-4.
  11. I believe it is a known piece that just hasn't been slabbed up until now. Tony Clayton had a picture of it on his website back in 2015.
  12. There are three real ones, they all came from the same safe deposit box from the San Francisco area that had a lot of other "error" coins that had probably all had help in their creation.
  13. Depends on the knowledge level of the bidders. If they know much of anything, pretty much zero. if they don't have a clue, the sky is the limit.
  14. Don't misunderstand me, I DON'T believe they are real, I'm just saying that IN THEORY it could be possible for such an error to occur, the dies were all at the mint and in use at the same time so a muling of a 58 with a Memorial or a 59 with a wheat rev could happen, but the chances of it happening are very very small. There are a few cases of US coins with muled obv and reverse of the wrong years dies, but in almost every case the design change on the dies is very slight. In those cases where it is a significant change there is usually some evidence of shenanigans going on.
  15. The one with the hole is a chinese one cash coin, appears to be genuine. With a little work I could give therough date range and the mint but I don't have the time for that at the moment. The bottom two a very poor modern fakes of a pruta of Judea, the "widows Mite" mentioned in the bible. The top two are a very poor fake ancient coin that either Readers Digest or Publishers Clearinghouse used in a promotion decades ago.
  16. Don't kid yourself. Sure the fakers making junk thats significantly off weight and wrong composition, the stuff that is laughable, they don't follow the forums. But the producers of higher end products do. As for telling you what things to look for, that doesn't really work too well because every counterfeiter has a different "thing". If you focus on searching for a specific feature, you end up missing all the other fakes that don't have it. The best advice is to study as many known genuine coins as you can. Every producer has their own "style" for lack of a bettter word. Once you are very familiar with the style of a genuine coin, a fake just immediatle send up warning signs. Even if you can't say WHY a coin is fake you just get that "off" feeling that tells you to look deeper.
  17. Actually there is, Same way a 59 could in theory have been struck with a wheat rev. or how 1992 cents were made with Close AM reverses.
  18. No it would not keep it from being "BU", as mentioned though it would keep it from straight grading. It's value would be lessened, but I would not say down to melt value.
  19. Gold is fairly inert and doesn't tone that much.
  20. The town I live in issued two of those flats back in 1936 to mark the cities Centennial, 5 cent denomination one red, one green. I have one of them still hoping to find the other some day. 1936 makes them some of the earliest wooden flats.
  21. I don't care if they are inaccurate on price of grade, I just would like them to be as up to date on types, and compositions/size would also be very helpful. I do the world by type since 1860 (no gold or NCLT). I currently have two 14 inch double row boxes, some dating back 5 or 6 years which still are not listed. I'm still wondering what will happen with the catalogs as one company owns the rights to the book and another company owns the database the books are compiled from.
  22. Well I don't know the tolerance range for Canadians but with a weight difference of almost .8 grams I would think weight would be a good first step. Tolerance probably wouldn't be any greater than that of similar US coins so about +/- .2 grams. That would make the minimum weight for the 80% silver about 5.6 grams and the maximum of the 50% silver would be 5.25 grams. So almost a .4 gram gap between the ranges.