Hello, this is my first time here, love the forum, its very informative. I have a question concerning a coin I was given about 15 years ago and would like to know if any one knows its worth. As far as I could figure, it is a "piece of eight" minted in Mexico. The year on the front is 1806 and has the words Carolus IIII on it and on the back it has Hispana ET. IND . REX. M. 8R.T.H. I've seen some simular coins sold for well under $100 but the quality is no where near as good as the one I have.It seems flawless, every detail can be seen, even small words written around the scrolls on the back side. Can anyone give me an educated guess as to its value? Thanks in advance.
Greetings and welcome to the forum. What your describing is infact an 8 Reale piece. It would help greatly if you could post a picture of the coin, but based upon your description $75 sounds like a good possibility on the value of yours. There are a lot of other defining marks on it like maybe an M with a 0 over it or a dollar sign $, thus the picture would help. Again, Welcome Ben
Ah, the pictures... It's a Mexico City (M with an o over it) issue. It looks to be in XF-40 shape and again might fetch $75 in my opinion Thanks for posting the pictures. If they were a bit larger it would help further. Do you have a sight to host larger pics? Take Care Ben
I placed it on a website I am working on now. The images are a lot bigger on this page: http://www.anteex.com/poecoins.htm
If genuine, Bone is pretty close with the value estimate. But I suggest that you weigh the coin, there are a couple of things in the pics that make me suspicious but they could be the result of the way you cropped the pic. Can you post anothe rpic where you leave some of th ebackground around the coin ? Weigh it and report back.
I re-scanned the coin with a ruler to better gauge the diameter and loaded it up to the page. The coin weighs exactly 26.934 grams. http://www.anteex.com/poecoins.htm
Well the weight is OK, but there is what looks like a casting ring around the edges of the coin - that's what bothers me. At first I thought maybe that was because you tried to crop the picture round to make it fit the coin, but in this pic, it doesn't appear you did that. So, given that the weight is good about the only thing you can do is to have an epxert in these coins do an in hand examination to see if it is genuine.
The coin looks OK to me. I am not seeing the "casting ring". My scanner, a 2001 HP ScanJet 3400C, frequently creates reflections off the sides of coins, especially coins with uneven edges like old Spanish coins or Roman coins.
