Report on the Baltimore show. I arrived early enough to have to wait about 20 minutes before the doors were open to the public at 10AM. This pretty much sums up my 3 hours at the show. I'm not the type to hang around after I find what I want. Attendance was as expected for a Friday morning. I would call it a "light crowd"; good for moving around and bellying up to dealers' tables. In general prices appeared to be down about 10% from what I expected to pay. I mentioned that to MFD and he agreed. Looks like the dealers finally realized that the economy required this action. My aim was to buy at greysheet plus 50% of the difference between greysheet and Coin Values. And in all cases I beat that price. My Plan A was almost a total whiff. I did get the last coin I needed for my type set (1840 SL Dime, Stars/No Drapery). I was extremely disappointed in the 1790-something half cents. Every coin (VF/XF) I looked at had the words "HALF/CENT" missing from the reverse. These were mostly 1795's. In fact most often the date was very lightly struck too. According to the dealer this is the more normal situation. Because of the smaller planchet they were just not fully struck. Apparently 1794 half cents are much better struck so he's going to be on the lookout for a well struck VF for me. At a slightly higher price. My MFD had no IHCs for me. He wasn't happy with any he had seen so far in the grade I wanted. But he's resubmitted the 1864 "L" for me in hopes of nudging it up one point on the MS- scale. So I had to resort to Plan B. The objective was to upgrade affordable Morgans to VF or better. I had a 5 that I wanted to do this to. And I got them all. Plus now that gives me some better date Morgans to sell/auction. Helps defray the cost. Pictures later today.
Okay, here's the images. I'm doing them as links because there are 7 of them. I didn't get this at the show. Won it on eBay. http://home.comcast.net/~dcderoo/50-1936-RhodeIsland-Final-txt.jpg The most important coin I bought. It completes my type set. http://home.comcast.net/~dcderoo/10-1840-Stars_NoDrapery-Final-txt.jpg The rest are upgrades to my Morgan set. 1878 7/8tf http://home.comcast.net/~dcderoo/100-1878-7_8tf_Strong-Final-txt.jpg 1885-CC (and I think my first rainbow toned coin) http://home.comcast.net/~dcderoo/100-1885cc-Final-txt.jpg 1889-CC http://home.comcast.net/~dcderoo/100-1889cc-Final-txt.jpg 1892-CC http://home.comcast.net/~dcderoo/100-1892cc-Final-txt.jpg 1895-S http://home.comcast.net/~dcderoo/100-1895s-Final-txt.jpg
Yeh, AU-53. It's not a particularly appealing coin but after searching for about 2 years I was going to buy anything close to the grade I wanted.
Congrats on completing the type set! I'd love to see you do a photo album of it. I was considering going to the show, as I live 2 hours away, but I got killed at the office this week. Laying low this weekend.
I had a website at one time, but that was before I had completed my set. Plus I've reformatted most of my images. I'll have to revisit my code and see what I can do about bringing it up to date. It was done in HTML. If I had Dreamweaver I probably could do a better job and do it faster. But I created my own HTML. A real programmer would probably choke if he saw my source code. It was somewhat ... unsophisticated.
