Madness

Crap. Cost me about $750 AUD (about 420 GBP), which represents six months of saving for me. Overpriced for what it is? Would you try to return it?

My 1794 spade guinea arrived today. Crap photos. Not surprising as I'm a crap photographer using a mediocre phone! There's a ton of wear on the obverse and a little less on the reverse. This book that I bought last week states the following: "The lack of high relief on the guinea means that, to the naked eye, there is not much detail remaining in coins graded Very Fine or Extremely Fine, and the amount of lustre is an important indication of the degree to which a coin has been in circulation." Is this statement true? The most obvious wear on this example is certainly to the laurel wreath (the high point of the obverse) and George's hair. If so, the seller is possibly correct in grading it gVF. I would have called it F without reading this. Do you think the coin has been dipped? Not sure what gold coins should look like in regards to toning/lustre. Image makes the coin look white-ish. It's actually more gold-ish IRL. Thanks!

Tried to post, but image attachment exceeded limit. Tried work around in subsequent post in the form of an embedded imugr picture. Sorry!

Source: Rob's first test shilling I've marked the image. Red circles indicate wear. Blue circles indicate die issues. Green circles indicate possible engraving variations. Running out of time, so didn't do much with legend or reverse. My guestimate of grade would be somewhere in the region of VF for both sides. Please criticise!

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Most certainly you can recommend it! Looks great. Thank you.

@Rob Yep - Made some of those comments in my grading attempt. Good to have your confirmation. What does the term "texture" mean?

Thank you for helping me. Do you mean that the image is bright, or the coin is bright?

Yep - That's the one. You posted it for me a few days ago in this thread Thanks for providing a larger images though. Very helpful!

Thanks @Rob I assumed this would be the best approach. I've saved an example of a Pingo proof and your uncirculated examples to compare to. There are some variations between the Pingo Proof to the circulation examples, though.

First coin off the rank: Source of images Obverse: 1. Cleaned, possibly also dipped - Evenness of tone; fine scratch marks of almost uniform direction, lack of patina 2. Wear - Significant flattening of surfaces and lack of detail in eyebrow, hair, ear, mouth 3. Die issue - Clogging of die in pauldron removing top section of parallel lines; Clogging of stems in two left-most top leaves of laurel. My grade guess: VF Reverse: 1. As per obverse, possible dipping, although evidence of dirt in bottom right quarter 2. Wear - Flattening of rampant lion in British shield; Flattening of Fleur-de-lis; Other general wear on higher points, but the aforementioned are the two most obvious examples 3. Die issues - Clogging of central vertical lines; Clogging of the left-most middle semee of hearts; Details in harp seem sharper than many I have seen My grade guess: gVF Inviting criticism!

What would cause the "grainy" surface on this coin? It seems closer to "uncirculated" than the other two I've been eyeing off. Would the mark on the bottom right crown be wear/scratch? Would you grade this as "extremely fine"? I've been using the 2014 "Australian Coins and Banknotes" by Greg McDonald as a price guide (it includes this as it's a proclamation coin), which lists EF as $295 AUD and UNC as $450 AUD - 170 and 250 GBP respectively. Is he barking up the wrong tree as far as values are concerned. I thought that I might start up a thread showing images of coins and that I'd attempt to grade them. I'd then ask for people to correct my "guesses". Do you think anyone here would be willing to help me out with this learning project?

An eclectic selection of some of my favourites.

Thanks Rob. I'd love to own a coin like that. Could someone please circle the cabinet wear. I'm not sure what that means. Is it evident in the rampant lion in the Hanoverian shield, or in the British shield? Is the lower level of the "H" for "Hibernia" related to a die problem?

What do you think a reasonable price would be for this example? Do you agree with an AUNC grading? https://www.wacoins.com.au/shop/george-iii-1787-great-britain-shilling-aunc-superb/ Thanks again

Thanks Paddy! If you have a nice spare I'd be very happy to buy it from you for a reasonable price. Will need to save, though. I have a monthly hobby budget of $100 AUD, which is about 55 GBP and have just spent the last of my hobby savings on a couple of numismatic books.

I like this XF example of the 1787 shilling: https://www.sovr.co.uk/coins/great-britain/george-iii-1787-shilling-hearts-bg03046.html Do you think the price is reasonable? Will sellers hold coins if you're unable to pay for a while?

With this sequence of posts I don't need my baggy trousers: I need my fighting trousers. https://youtu.be/0iRTB-FTMdk

You win!

An embarrassed embarrassment. Oh, for the wings of a dove!

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https://youtu.be/5EcnUmnbyUQ Beautiful song about a collector of a different sort. Big Big Train are a contemporary Brit prog rock outfit. Lineup includes Dave Gregory of XTC.

Great band! That song takes me back to me back to the early eighties. Many reasons for the choice of my user name.

I started to plan a comparative analysis to find as many variations in the 1787 shilling as I could find and work out their combinations to see if I could notice a pattern. Before I got more than toe deep I decided to look into the meaning of the reverse legend. Stumbled across this amazing article. It explains everything! Answers all my questions. From the conclusion: "These coins represent an intermediate stage in the modernization of coinage techniques. The inscriptions on the obverse dies were made with individual letter punches, a centuries-old practice, but the reverse dies were sunk from fully-lettered punches, a major advance. Even on the reverse dies, however, fine features such as stops, the Westphalian horse, the semee of hearts in the Hanoverian arms, and the strings of the Irish harp were added individually, suggesting that truly complete punches (except for the last two date digits) remained difficult to manufacture or impractical to use". This explains the differences I was seeing in the positioning of the inscriptions on the obverse. I also noticed that some examples had a six-stringed harp and others had a seven-stringed harp on the reverse. I can imagine some poor bugger trying to hand-engrave evenly-spaced strings on various die. Not an easy task I would imagine. Boy this hobby goes deep! I could spend a lifetime trying to track down strikings from all the different dies of this coin and a mint finding a Pingo proof. That in itself would be another rabbit hole, collecting a complete set of these 1787 proofs of shilling, sixpence, guinea and half-guinea! I can see much fun awaits me! Please correct me if I misuse jargon.

Does "legend" mean the text on a coin?