Chris Perkins

The slabbed '34 I had wasn't slabbed by me. I don't think I'd go to the risk of sending valuable coins to the USA to get them slabbed, unless they were American or Canadian coins (which do go a bit mad when slabbed as very high grades). I've done it with Canadian coins before, and it's not that cheap really and only worth doing for the coins that you consider to be practically perfect. I sent 6 coins and 4 came back MS60+, 2 of which were MS64 and the other 2 were AU58. Most British coins still sell within the UK, and while it may be worthwhile doing it with the almost legendary modern coins, eg a top grade 1934 crown, a 1937 Sovereign, 1905 halfcrown, 1869 penny (all have to be UNC or better) etc...I'd personally not consider it for coins under £500 value, and I don't think the values of most coins would be increased all that much by slabbing. When sending things from the UK, the maximum insured value to the USA is only £500 and even that's touch and go if when something goes missing the RM decide it was 'money' and don't cover it! The best thing to do (and I have considered this) is save up a few top grade rare valuable coins (worth say £10,000 minimum to make it worthwhile) and visit one of the coin shows in the US where they grade them while you wait. Having say 10 coins authenticated, each worth about £1000 each to start with may well make them more interesting enough to cover your air fair. But....they are strict at PCGS/NGC etc, and you should bear in mind, that all the coins need to turn out at least MS63 to give them that extra something. No one will pay much over catalogue for most MS60's or below, and certainly most AU58's and below aren't worth slabbing.

I've got that too! I used it to convert some of the image files of the old Rotographic books into gifs.

Ah, yes, I'll have a look at that.

I use Jasc PaintShop which has loads of features and is very cheap. It should be possible (in a round about way) in paint.

Just checking it's not just me that can see the distinctive blue and biege look?

No, Post all you like Geordie, there is no limit. Seeing what others have in their collection is interesting. It gives the site some new and frequently updated content, and should therefore encourage visitors, and some of those will no doubt buy things, so it's all good.

My god, it's eating up the old band width use already! But, it's ok, I've done another deal with the hosts and I know get lots of bandwidth and webspace for a fixed annual fee, and I'm, going to plaster the forum with (subtle) ads to try and get some of that back.

Exactly! I'm going to do something with the top bit, but one thing at a time.. And the avatar sizes.

It gets easier every year! Soon a GCSE will be about the same as an old 11+ and an A level will be like a GCSE. (Happy B-Day Jon)

Pictures should work again now! That just looks like a double struck (double punched) 1858, you can see that even the border beads are doubled at the bottom.

He's got no chance at all! You can buy piles of old rubbish all day long, all your going to get is poorer, you're not going to get any 1933 pennies, regardless of what clueless sellers say! No one wants to throw away £200, but it could have been a lot worse!

After all the dodgy links to porn, medications and various other spam commodities by new members, I have now set up the forum to email me each time a new member joins. I then have to manually approve the account before they can start posting. Any accounts originating in Russia, China, or the usual spam server countries will not be approved by default unless the user can demonstate over email a genuine interest in coins! It's such a shame people abuse the freedoms of this forum.

I tell you what, since I've switched to manual member approval I've been getting 3-5 attempts everyday from people with .ru email addresses and/or registering names like cheap-vigra and win-casino! When someone registers a new account now, there is a message saying that accounts registered from certain countries will not be approved until the registrant emails to show a genuine interest etc etc. I've emailed a couple of suspect accounts but they didn't reply and therefore got zapped. The results are good though, since being picky about who is allowed in, there has been less spam.

Ok, please email a picture to cp@predecimal.com

Done that! I knew I'd seen that setting somewhere! (the admin area is totally different for me now)

Just to let people know that I have recently purchased (yes, more money spent!) the latest version of the Invision forum software. It'll have new features and it will look better! Hopefully I can make it more spam proof too. I'll also be installing an add on which will alow users to setup their own coin photo gallery! Much like what is done on another site that you probably all know about! You'll be able to easily share pictures of your coins with all the forum users in your own sort of coin photo album. The forum upgrade will go on over the weekend at some point (I hope) and the photo add on will be added once that first stage has gone smoothly. There are a few unknown variables, so while I'll try to make sure there is very little down time during the switch, you'll understand if the forum doesn't run well or is not available over the weekend.

It should be like before, they should be dark blue when there's something new. Unless you were using an alternative skin (of which none of them work properly yet!)? I need to sort out the skins too, so when that's done, if you change it you might get it back to how it looked for you.

Very interesting thread, well done TomGoodHeart (the same idea did cross my mind actually, but I thought I'd let someone else get the glory). As it's technically sort of a fake and I collect fakes, how much do you want for it Geordie?

Ok, I shall take your suggestions in most sincerely!

How do you think I should customise it? I want to put predecimal and rotographic banners at the bottom, and I want links at the top too. What else?

Invision based sites all look the same....I'll be customising it when I get a moment.

You should also be able to post in the forum like you did before. Do you get an error message?

You may have noticed the new style forum! It's still in it's default state at the moment, so I'll to predecimalise it will be the next job.

Those are Chinese. They looked like that up until about the begininning half of the last century. The writing will tell a Chinese reader the province name and the ruler. Most are very common and have very little value.

No doubt the Royal Mint are taking in the bronze coins as quickly as possible, selling the metal and replacing them with copper plated steel examples as we speak!