davidrj

Photoscape is free and has a circular crop tool

There's a nice genuine 2mm here for comparison

A cautionary article for those contemplating investing in bullion - link David

I keep looking at 1863 pennies.................................................

Roughly about the same purchasing power! it would have bought a decent sized chocolate bar I got a 1939 Irish halfpenny (scarce coin) in my change last year, also had a 1954 farthing a couple of years ago

Indeed. And £200 for it. Bizarre!

Baldwin77 thanks to Google

Nice! :-) But a silly question - how do you differentiate between bronze and copper? weight? colour? David Not a silly question at all, and I guess the only 100% test would be a metallurgical analysis. Bronze is around 95% -97% copper, so the relative densities are almost identical, hence weight doesn't really help. I bought my coin from Mark Rasmussen who owned, and has handled, many other similar proofs. He assured me that the coloration of this coin, compared to the otherwise identical bronze proofs, was very evident. The same difference that exists between the 'yellow/brown olive' toned examples of pre 1860 copper pennies and the subsequent bronze coinage which doesn't exhibit the same toning. In hand it is very evident. Thanks! Circulated copper and bronze certainly have a different "feel" in hand, copper being softer. I've several jetons where I'm just not sure

Nice! :-) But a silly question - how do you differentiate between bronze and copper? weight? colour? David

Court's (1972) figures agree with Freeman 1+A 2434 1+B 296 2+A 162 2+B 8292 suggesting a mintage of 1.7M for 1+B However Sealy (1970) has 2+A rare, 1+B very rare; I have a nice 2+A but a decent 1+B is on my wants list too

Repetitive tasks get hard wired into the brain, so you can almost do them in your sleep your handwriting will be different to mine, even though we are both using the same tools (pens) and producing the same object (words) from the same base resource (letters)

May have been just one man doing that job in each mint! Rob, do we have any records of the size of the workforce, the total number of blanks cut, and the time span of the mintages? Currently doing some research on the production of French Revolutionally bronze 1791-3 (taxing my O level French) entire yearly mintages appear to have taken only a week or so at each mint

Not so, a skilled worker would be able to get almost identical weights every time, and his work would be recognisable. Given Rob's comments re low circulation, I think he may be onto something useful

First time I've looked at this interesting thread - forget the B in BR - the D of F:D is far easier to spot, the D points directly to a corner on the left hand coin - need to dig my thruppences out

Interesting! If we were talking about newly produced hand cut blanks, a forensic expert could no doubt testify that some were made by Joe and others by Fred, due to the habitual shape and direction of tooling marks. After a couple of hundred years of circulation, clipping and cabinet wear... who knows

Details of dates

Much better than my two! another rare coin on my upgrade list! Freeman only found 7 with the narrow date die out of 354 1879 pennies from circulation; applying Court's methodology that's a mintage of approx 152,000 out of 7,666,000 Note (and now I'm in Full Geek Mode) that my two coins have different date spacing (Gouby lists only 1) - so at least two narrow date dies were in use

Welcome Nicky! I think most of us here started out by looking for nice coins from our (& parents') change Good list of all the 50p types here with background information on the commemorative issues Happy hunting David

I've been on a lookout for an upgrade for some time without success; so i guess this ultrawide 1896 is rare, as is the wide date 1895, again mine being the only example I've seen

Are there any other differences? Who knows? grade is awful

Only 2 widths for 1898, but two different fonts for final 8

I have 4 widths for 1896

I was about to respectfully point this out: I stand corrected ! Here's my wide date 1895 Not in Gouby and seems to be pretty scarce

There are quite noticable date variations for 1895, 1896 and 1899. The rarity seems to increase with date width,which probably indicates they were spottedand corrected 1897,1900,1901 and the EdVII date variations usually need a lens to spot and are of less interest in my view