Here is a nicely toned 1833 Capped Bust Half which was delivered today. I had no idea it had the toning until it arrived. A nice little surprise Take Care Bone
It looks like a high end vf. Also looks cleaned, just like 99% of all capped bust half dollars. Out of all the coins I ever see, it seems like these are the most frequently cleaned. Do you (or CT) possibly have any insight into why this is?
Rocketman, no I didn't notice the scratch Big Z, No idea why folks always clean the Bust Halves, but your right, they a re cleaned a lot B
Primarily because of their age. Back then, and well into the 1900's it was considered as a normal practice for collectors to clean all of the coins in their collection.
Bush halves tended to spend much of the first part of their lives in bags, meeting the on-hand specie requirement for banks that typically had no access to silver dollars (not made between 1804 and 1836) or gold (always scarce until the Dahlonega and Charlotte gold fields came in). They then began to appear in circulation long after the series had ended, nicely toned and in good condition. Their antiquity got them noticed and saved, which accounts for the large numbers of them still available. As GDJ points out, this also got them cleaned by people who didn't find the toning attractive.
A bust half in any condition is rare. 99% of them didn't escape the smelting pot or were lost in time. The ones that were saved were not treated well. It used to be a very common practice to clean the tarnish off of your coin collection. It wasn't until much later that cleaning was frowned upon by collectors. There is less out there to collect than what the demand is.
Makes sense. It's a shame though, as I think the bust halves are beautiful coins, particularly when they are uncleaned.
That an O-105? The reverse at least looks very similar to the bust half I have. Other than that scratch on the front, that's a real nice looking one!
It does look like one, but it's an O-113 with the 1 on the obverse higher than the 8 and on the reverse the I under the left side of the T and 5 much higher than the 0. Thanks for looking Bone
How do you define rare ? The last study I did on the population of graded bust halves there were over 56,000 graded by NGC & PCGS alone. And 26,000 of those were graded AU50 and up. By the way, I did that study over 3 years ago, I rather think the number has likely increased substantially since then.
Those figures don't count resubmittals. The collector base for US coins is very large. The Ben Franklin commems had a run of 50,000, they were sold out within a few days. There are also many people with several of them. There are bust half nuts with well over 100 in their collection. Out of the 91,000,000 capped bust halves minted, only 56,000 are accounted for. That's far less than 1% of the total mintage. If the coin collector base was only 10% of the US population (200 Million), there would be enough bust halves for less than 0.5% of collectors. Then you could adjust the figures because the average bust collector has several and some have probably been resubmitted.
Oh c'mon now Pyro, those are just the coins graded by 2 companies. There have been thousands more graded by other companies and that doesn't count the vast majority of them that haven't been graded at all and are raw. My point is this, bust half dollars as a type are not rare by any sense of the word. Yes there are specific dates, mints, and varieties that are rare - of that there is no doubt. But bust half dollars as a type are almost as common as Morgan dollars. If you wish to believe otherwise - OK, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. But I am not talking about opinions, I am talking about the number of coins known to exist. There are 12 pages of them available just on eBay right now.
