declanwmagee

good effort, Mr AardHawk - what a star!

Yes. I use about 4 different ways to value my coins: 1) an average of Tony Clayton, British Coins Market Values, Spink, and CCGB 2) What I paid for it 3) What I think I could get for it (based on my own historical sales records) 4) What I'm asking for it Wildly different numbers in most cases

The very first coin in my collection was an 1873 Halfpenny that I found in a stream when I was about 9 years old. Of course I've no idea how long it was there but it has the same dark green colour...

still looks like a jolly nice coin though

Well, Dan, I tell you what. Your collection is better than mine was 5 years ago when I started properly, and now I'm seriously thinking about how I can become a full time coinie.

Welcome Dan! without even looking the answer to "is it worth building upon" has to be yes. Get stuck in to eBay; you'd be amazed at what old junk is saleable there. Then you can start upgrading... Now I'll go and have a proper look.

and don't get us onto 1920/21 silver or 1911 pennies

Well done, Rich, you've got one! Never mind the microvarieties they were talking about, having a 26ME is achievement enough.

Rich that's the funniest post I've read for a long time - had us both laughing out loud here in our little bus. So I was quite looking forward to having a look at your 26ME. Trouble is, you showed us the wrong blinking side! It's good for the subvariety the big boys were on about, but I reckon we should see the Obverse first...

Crikey, Derek. Is that your 26ME? Or is it a 27?

I tend to go for the nose: bulbous is non-ME, pointy is ME

Have a look through Page 2 of this very thread, Ski!

bloody lovely. I'm sure that'll be a gap in my collection for some years to come yet...

Just re-read a thread here where the broken R in 1905 halfcrowns was discussed, and I think the big boys concluded that a broken R did not necessarily mean the coin was iffy, just that a few known iffy examples had the same flaw. Just as likely to be a Royal Mint flaw as a 1970s Turkish flaw! Phew.

Hmmm. Anyone want to comment on the broken R in EDWARDVS? I'm not qualified, but...

Conor, put the pics on a third party hosting site like Photobucket, ImageShack etc, then use the Insert Image button to put them on here. Then you don't have to worry about 150k limits.

D of DEI to a bead L of HALF to a bead Really is that a variety? I get calm sea 57 but maybe I'm missing something. Yep - 4 kinds of 1956 ha'penny; crossover mule of Obv 3+4, and Rev C+D, so you get: 3+C F471 - C10 - D of DEI between beads, L of HALF between beads 3+D F473 - R5 - D of DEI between beads, L of HALF to a bead 4+C F474 - R12 - D of DEI to a bead, L of HALF between beads 4+D F475 - R3 - D of DEI to a bead, L of HALF to a bead Peck doesn't distinguish, they're all 2513 to him. I've only ever seen 3+C.

D of DEI to a bead L of HALF to a bead

Got a scanner, Conor?

1827 penny anyone

1st quick tip, Conor; do the XL sheet the other way around - dates down the left hand side, denominations across the top. I can see that you've copied the denominations from Tony Clayton's excellent site, so that should be able to tell you all you need to know about values, so long as you can grade the coins - a few example scans to the experts here will give you a good idea about grading. It's an excellent starter collection if you ask me. I'd be tempted to keep it, and upgrade the worst coins first. Sell what gets kicked out and use the funds to upgrade more. It'll develop a momentum of it's own if you let it. Lots of duplicates in there, so where you have a group of identical coins, keep the best one, and sell the rest. You have a nice spread of George V silver in there. Pretty much regardless of grade you'd be surprised how saleable that is on fleabay at the moment. Victoria Bun Pennies are going nuts at the moment too.

Welcome Conor! ...and welcome to the hobby. Before long you'll have no spare time left, you'll have become an expert on spreadsheets and photography, you'll know eBay inside out, and you'll be squinting through a magnifying glass trying to decide whether something points at a border bead, or between them. Or you might just sell them, who knows?

You mean, like the tub of 1933 pennies, or the bucket of 1954's sitting on top of the box of 1955's, on the pile of 1956's...? Well, these minting machines are pretty fast, and were in those days too, relatively speaking. I've always wondered if only 1 1954 penny was made, or only one was nicked. I just can't imagine setting the machine up and getting it to make One Coin. More likely that it made a run, the chap was told to put them all in the melting pot and slipped a few out on his way there. There must be tubs of stuff that never made it to the melting pot - we've all done that at work: "I'll just put that there, and come back for it later", then someone stops you in the corridor and you never quite get back to where you were...

As its unlikely that a Mint worker would happen to have a 1939 sixpence in his pocket, that suggests there might be tubs of old stock lying around in dark corners in the Mint - fascinating! I wonder what other treasures lurk in there...?

I try and keep my stupidly complex Excel file under 20Mb, from bitter experience. Oddly, it's things like conditional formatting and large areas of unused space that take up the room, not what you'd expect. I can fill as many cells as I want with lengthy formulae, unwieldy nested IFs and INDEX and MATCH functions, but try and make it look pretty and you can run into trouble quickly! Oh, and that's with 4Gb of RAM...