Rob

Harold II (he of the arrow in the eye) hence the reference to 950 years of French rule and the vote to leave their private club. Wilton mint, the moneyer is Aelfwold and it's about 20mm diameter. The portrait is slightly double struck, but I can live with that as there is minimal wear. Sorry, couldn't resist adding it to the penny acquisition thread. Hope springs eternal that a few of you might cast your eyes a bit further back than 1860.

Picked up today to celebrate the end of French rule 950 years after it began.

There might be some mileage in this as the auction lots are likely to be done on a conveyor belt, suggesting the lights will be run contiuously and will get hotter, whereas a single coin for slabbing, or even a small consignment, will not result in the lamp(s) reaching as high a temperature as in the former case. i.e. the single shot picture will be cooler.

Ah, but we have black puddings from Bury market - best there is.

thanks all

Does anyone know how to convert a nef file to a jpg file, or alternatively how to persuade paint to work with a nef file? I'm pretty certain the question has been answered before, but search doesn't find it. Thanks.

I got one of the offspring to do this for me. Now I can happily hold myself responsible for my own mistakes, as opposed to thinking I have written something which on examination is complete and utter b****cks.

Private Eye recently highlighted what must be the ultimate two letter word misprunt from the Grauniad website - 'Are you going to vote to leave the UE(sic) or not?' Thinking about it, they might have also written my mobile's predictive text software. Every time I tried to write 'no' it corrected it to 'on' - this despite the fact that a significant proportion of texts are questions, many of which require a simple yes or no answer. Somewhat fewer can be answered with on or off.

You can get the featured cleaning sign for 11.99 + vat from Viking. http://www.viking-direct.co.uk/catalog/search.do?Ntt=cleaning+sign&N= That would be a far better fashion accessory to wear stood outside the car wash.

You're lucky. I've got 110 gaps in my Saxon/Mercian list

The Grauniad always manages to express itself badly. Obviously branching out from its home turf of a near monopoly on spelling mistakes. Apparently the preferred newspaper of the teaching professions........................... God help us.

The series is called rip-off Britain. It doesn't really leave much scope for reallocation of blame, which manifestly should be the case for those who spend tens of thousands on 'investments' from the LMO and similar without doing due diligence. They certainly wouldn't buy a car without taking it for a test-drive. To my mind it is simply sellers pandering to the market. People want to be greedy and see unrealistic returns ahead of them, and so the market will oblige. Caveat emptor should outweigh all other arguments, but a programme title demanding that people are being ripped-off can't afford to say the audience is to blame - so there's no danger of an objective discussion

I'm afraid we need a bit more than 10 minutes notice, so missed it. There is going to be a rip-off Britain program on 'investment' coins some time soon, but don't know when. I declined to take part on the ground that the programme title precluded objectivity. I don't have access to the BBC's schedule.

Obviously the more mistakes the rarer the error, but it shouldn't surprise people that they get through as there is not sufficient flan missing to bugger up the striking process, after all, the attached got though and that is missing considerably more of the circumference.

The key is going to be whether the radius of the missing bits matches the coin. There is no reason to assume that only one clip could occur. To have a different radius to the 10p requires you to have a flan clipped in two places and also of the wrong diameter, i.e. a blank in the wrong bucket and with two unusual errors. Do you win the lottery on a regular basis?

The above is a reasonable ballpark, but some of the provincial coins can go a gram lower. There are also lightweight issue coins for which the weight is around 13g

Which it doesn't appear to................. I get notifications of likes all the time, but nothing appeared as a consequence of the above @ Don't worry, I'm not going to lose any sleep over the lack of notification

ok

Thanks - I had assumed it was a fashion accessory peculiar to social media (which I don't have). Why do you need to advertise to the world that you have sent an email to a person? Surely the anonymity of a PM is preferable 99 times out of 100? Next question about tag signs. What is the purpose of all the grey tag labels I see against threads? On the assumption they serve a practical purpose, how do they get tagged, how do you use the tags, are they specific to the people involved in the thread, or do they have a wider practical use?

What do these blue @ boxes mean and their significance/importance?

MAG, BRIT, FRAN and HIB can be shortened further. It could possibly be a means of differentiating between moneyers(?) You tend not to see these type 3s with multiple pellet stops, whereas the large upturn in mint output during 'plume' ( a 15-fold increase over heart) resulted in the appearance of a lot of dies with up to seven pellets instead of the previous one or two pellet stops, the latter either as colons or wedge and pellet. To me this only makes sense in the context of increased mint output, i.e. you would need more engravers to produce the dies. There is circumstantial evidence to support this theory in the Royalist provincial coins where I have compiled a list that gives well over 90% correlation between the number of pellets or other marks, time of striking and location based on military activity. All this points towards some form of overall control and personal accountability for dies. In arriving at this conclusion I have made the assumption that old habits die hard, and if some form of control existed before the war, so it would be logical to extend working practices along the same lines to which everyone was accustomed. In that way you can follow the tracks of several individuals around the country.

There are blue boxes for 1951 too, though I've never seen a crown in one that colour

That wasn't a bad coin and was on my list to buy if cheap enough. I think you paid a full price for it, but it a nice round coin. It isn't a rare coin. I'd go with VF. I thought there was a trace of a portcullis underneath the bell from a previous incarnation of the die. Traces of a former die are quite common, and in the case of portcullis was used on the previous type of halfcrown issued, being the mark that preceded bell. Not sure what you mean about missing letters as they are all there, though the S is double struck, but this is common and a function of the number of blows required to fully strike up the coin. The date is as per Spink and the number 60 comes from the list of mint marks compiled originally by Seaby. This is a question that's asked on a regular basis. The list has been published in Seaby's and subsequently Spink's annual tome ever since the book was published, and is a damning indictment of laziness on the part of many collectors who don't bother reading from cover to cover. p.535-7 in the current volume refers,

Blocked die, but only worth a couple pounds at the most. There are a few examples shown on this forum elsewhere