but I couldn't do it. I was going to crack this out to put in my album, so instead I made a page for it.
I’ve only cracked one slab. It was a coin that never should have been slabbed in the first place. I bought it to plug a hole in my folder.
I have a full set of Mercury Head dimes in an album, except the Micro-s, the 42/1 and 42/1D are slabbed and will remain so even though there are openings in the album for them.
I've cracked several. NTC, SEGS, etc etc. I've cracked out the same coin twice, an 1899P Morgan. Got graded by ANACS AU58, PCGS MS details, and finally found a new tomb, MS61, ANACS. I'm done with that one.
I have an AU large cent on the way for the 70/70; we'll see if I have the nerve to get out the cutting pliers.
I have two completed sets one for each granddaughter. I too decided to not crack them open, what I did was place a white circular tab in the blank slots with a number assigned and the word slab (such as #102 slab) on them, works for me. Good luck.
Putting the slabs on the tracks is not cracking out. It's them varmints down by the 7-11 smoking the stuff.
If you have CDO, you can often find plastic "Slabbed Coin" disks for sale on fleaBay to stick in the hole.
Most valuable coin I ever broke out of a slab is a trade dollar; I got it for my Dansco 7070 set and so many trade dollars are faked want to make sure I was actually getting a real one. If I get a 1909-S VDB ever would be hard to justify breaking it out, but that empty hole would really bug me... might get like a play money penny to put in there just so I know it's full lol.
Cracking out key date coins is what my old economics professor called “a consumption act.” In order to get a decent price for the coin when you or your heirs sell it, it will have to be reslabbed. That’s expensive, and there is the risk that it will come back in a lower grade. Slabs also almost always provide better protection than albums. The only time I cracked out coins for an album page was when I put together a short set of Walking Liberty Half Dollars, 1941 to 1947.