Mark on My 1883-O Morgan, what to do ?

Here is a picture of the inner area of the ear which looks to have that die chip shaped like an "M".

 

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Whatever...as long as the OP understood the message.

Nevertheless, let's be more specific and consider things as others who are not on CT might believe. @imrich How am I doing?

1. TPGS professionals principally use "skin" to refer to the color tones seen on gold. Over time, some of this jargon has been applied to residues on silver but not to the toning on silver.

2. "Surface texture" has NOTHING to do with "skin." "toning," or "surface residue;" unless some one wishes to nitpick and describe the "texture" of a thick residue like corrosion.

3. Actually, I have found by experience that in very many cases, acetone will lighten toning and even the "skin" on gold!

4. "Surface contamination" covers a very broad range. So broad and complicated that others can discuss it if they wish. All I will say here is this: Soon after a coin is struck its surface starts to become contaminated. In many cases this can be a good thing. In others not so good. Anything we do chemically (acetone, water, etc) will change the surface for better or for worse.

Thanks for your comments for all here to clarify what I posted and thanks for reading this too.

 

A drop of acetone will not ruin the coin. It may change the color of the surface. A professional conservator would put your coin under a microscope and might remove some of the black without leaving any traces of his work behind. The key is SPOT conservation so that none of the surrounding surface is affected. This is not something to be tried without florescent light, a stereo microscope, a quiet room, and EXPERIENCE! As I wrote before, you will still have an impaired surface with the best conservation so IMO, leave it alone. As it is, you have a minor mint error on a very attractive coin.

 

One more to your explanation. I doing anything to the Morgan, if I were to attempt to remove the "mark". Would NGC or even PCGS or others see this and put on the label, "Improperly Cleaned"?

 

When a Q-tip that is soaking wet in acetone barely touches a coin's surface as was posted above there is no chance to damage the metal; however the chemical will remove any "skin" ...any surface contamination at that small spot. If this occurs, a professional would blend the surface contamination to hide his work.

Abrasively rubbing a Q-tip across that mark will pick-up some of the grit and scratch the coin's surface. That's called an attempted "spot removal."

Now try this experiment at home. Take a pristine peace dollar (cheap bullion), run it under water to remove any grit, blow dry it and then take a dry Q-tip and gently rub a spot. The coin will show no effects. Then increace the forse with a new Q-tip. See how hard you have to rub in order to put some hairlines on it.

There are many misconceptions and myths in numismatics such as properly dipping a pristine, original BU coin once can be detected.
Listen to everyone and read everything - then find out by personal experiment which opinions are mostly BS from the mouth/pen of squawking parrots.

 

By George I think we have a 36a, if it has an E on the reverse. Do you see the E clash above the bow. That's the important part.

Now, don't do ANYTHING to it. You can try the qtip thing but you're risking hairlines. They are going to inspect that area and if they see the slightest hint of someone trying to remove it they might details it. You DONT want that. You might have a 36a E clasher man! Leave the coin alone and send to get it slabbed

Only thing I would do is soak it in acetone for 10mins than rinse with clean acetone to remove any possible finger oils before slabbing. Aside from that resist the urge to do anything more.

 

Not if you did a "professional-like" job. You are not "technically" cleaning the coin by working on one spot. If you mess up and leave visual evidence - usually in the form of hairlines on the surrounding surface or scratches inside the mark, you as asking for a "Spot Removal" designation.

 

It's quite simple, really, as long as you acknowledge and plan safely for acetone's flammability and volatility. The hard part for many is making the decision to employ it properly, because there are as many situations when you don't want to remove the gunk as situations when you should. You can't forget that the coin surfaces under gunk will not have skinned (using jeffB's definition) the same way the still-exposed surfaces will have, and if you successfully remove the gunk you'll be left with patches of cleaned-looking surfaces (because you just cleaned them) which will be obvious indicators of treatment. The whole point of this is - for most coins, ancients use another set of rules - to come up with a nicer-looking coin which doesn't look cleaned. PVC plasticizer reactions, however, require treatment regardless of any other factor, because they're certain eventual death for the coin if left untouched.

Here's how I go about it, understanding I'm a bit....obsessive about the process:

I employ a shot glass of a size small enough to prevent the coin from laying flat, so acetone can touch every part of it. I do not use acetone in "spot" fashion; the majority of what you're using it for is an indication the whole coin needs to soak, and I soak the whole coin (at least the first step). If there's PVC, assume the whole coin has PVC. It's not visible until the chemical reactions have advanced. I employ a small square of glass as a cover for the shot glass, and the glass-on-glass contact is normally sufficient to prevent evaporation for long enough to get the job done. The soak sits next to an open bathroom window (few flammables in a bathroom, and usually good ventilation; I run the fan if one's there as well). Air movement is key.

I use a large rubber-tipped hemostat to handle the coin into and out of the acetone, because the small glass requires precise handling and you haven't felt pain until acetone touches an open cut on your hand.

Like so (not mine; this one's 6.5" and mine is 10" long):



The first "click" of connection on the handles is enough on mine for a nice positive grip, and you ensure they touch only the rim, and for my use that can be done without fear of harming the coin. Yes, the acetone will eventually eat away the rubber but if you rinse them immediately after use they'll last a long time. Mine are ten years old and still active.



If I've decided acetone is necessary, the first soak is always overnight. Acetone won't remove anything of toning or genuine chemical patina, and this is probably overkill on my part, but that's what I do. The following morning, I remove the coin and swish it in a fresh acetone bath in about a baby food-size jar. Acetone is one-time use only, and you destroy at after each use (if it's done its' job, there is nastiness suspended in it), so even though it's cheap you want to economize if you can. I've burned entire quarts on single coins....

So, I then inspect the coin to see what has and hasn't been accomplished. In extreme cases, one might need to work on the surface of the coin with something sharp to pick at an infestation; I do this with the coin in a shallow acetone bath, employing rose thorns and a table-standing magnifier. Good ventilation is a must for this process, because you're exposing yourself and your environment to a fairly high concentration of evaporated acetone - a pie-pan sized receptacle with 3/4" of acetone in a layer will evaporate completely in minutes. I have an N95-rated fullface respirator (acetone will attack your eyes rather quickly) with organic vapor cartridges - cost me $30 - for occasions when I'm feeling really paranoid.

If any visible PVC (I'm deliberately concentrating on PVC, because I rarely elect to remove anything else from a coin that acetone is capable of removing) is left, the coin gets another overnight soak. Lather, rinse, repeat.

 

My eyes are poor to see it but there is a clash above the "O", so I mean, at least this is worth sending in.

 

Can you get a good zoom pic of the bow/tailfethers area?

 

This is the best I can do with the camera I have. You can see the clash above the "O" the other I'm just not sure.

 

even using my loop I don't see anything. again bad eyes.

 

Uh oh. Might just be a 36 then

 

I don't see a partial E on the coin reverse, so both 22A and 36A are eliminated pretty much immediately. Even so, the prices on these have dropped so much in the last eight months or so that the 36A carries practically no premium and the 22A only carries a premium of about 75-125%.

Edit: Hmm... the die crack above the O screams 36A, which I guess always had the weaker clash, so I guess 36A no E clash?

 

Because the Morgan, I would say is a 62 why not send it in and find out right ?

 

It's not really worth sending in a MS62 common date Morgan, though. Also, even if you get the "36A" designation on the die crack technicality, I'm not sure any E-clash collectors will want it. After all, they're paying a premium for something they find cool: the actual clashed E.

 

No E means NOT a 36a and the crack above the mm is there before the E clashed. Check out the plate pics for the standard 36...

I can't say for sure from those scans if the E is there as it is faint. But the OP has it in hand so if he doesn't see it at various light angles then it most likely ain't there and is a standard 36...

http://www.vamworld.com/1883-O VAM-36

About slabbing it. If you want it in an error slab go ahead but to pay a full fee for a regular label is not a good idea unless you can get it in somebody's bulk order however with slag errors sometimes the tpgs give them details grades unless it is submitted under error attribution.

Since I'm submitting my slag error in probably a couple weeks to ngc if you want to send it to me, and the others you want graded, I'll put it/them in with mine and we can split the shipping. Up to you, just an offer. PM me if interested

 

Wait a minute... if you're only "working on one spot" that's doctoring the coin. Generally speaking, TPGs don't view an acetone bath as cleaning, since all it does is remove organic material from an inorganic surface. As for the comment on gold lightening, it's entirely possible that the reason behind the darker surface was the buildup of organic material over time, especially if we're talking about jewelry, or a non-pure source of acetone.

OP: If you don't know what you're doing, don't mess with the coin. Maybe it won't grade in its current state, maybe it will. The only thing we know for certain is if you start messing with the coin not knowing what you're doing, you're far more likely to hinder the outcome than improve it.

 

This is what I looked at:

http://www.vamworld.com/rmglae2_1883O_EDBCOMPS

As I said before, the 36A has such a weak E clash to begin with that it's not *that* unreasonable to have a 36A that actually has no visible clash, if the pressure on that coin happened to be a little off. After all, we're talking 1883 technology on the press...

 

... I don't see working on a spot as doctoring. I see it more like selective "dipping" as an aropos analogy. Just dangerous if you don't know what you're doing and botch it. Not doctoring though

Doctoring is like whizzing, applying putty to gashes, artifially toning a coin to hide hairlines or increase value. Stuff like that. Sucessful removal of a spot without any evidence a spot was ever there is conservation in my eyes. It's just a VERY dangerous type of conservation that takes more skill and knowledge than other common conservation methods