Has anyone ever bought from Crusty Romans?

I rarely buy coins from Australian dealers because the only ancients they have are the common ones. Some local dealers sell these common coins at outrageous prices, because their target market seems to be non-expert generalist collectors who don't know what to pay for an ancient coin. Other local dealers offer ancients for reasonable prices (comparable to what i'd expect to pay on vcoins) but the common stuff that doesn't interest me.

My only option really is purchasing from overseas dealers which is very easy to do. Is it too expensive given the A$ to US$/€/£ exchange rate? I'm not sure. Wages are pretty high here, i don't think the prices are unduly harsh for an Australian.

 

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Yes good point but good value only for the common ones.

 

Yep, almost all of the uncleaned Roman coins I have bought turned out to be quite common. Although a lot of the common follis that you get tend to be in incredible condition, I have a few really nice specimens that I got through Crusty Romans. They might not be worth much but they sure are pretty to look at.

I did however get a pretty nice silver denarius of Severus Alexander through them too. It hardly needed any cleaning and was very obviously a nice silver Roman coin. Anyone could have cherry-picked that out, but they didn't, and that one coin out of the 30+ paid for the whole lot. And I totally agree with you, the Greek ones are so much more interesting, and also tend to be worth more. I still have a bunch of really interesting Greeks that I bought a couple of years ago that need identifying and further cleaning (if I can find a safe way to get that damn stubborn crud off).

 

Hope to see the results from you're horde coins !

 

I bought three 1/2 kilo hoards from crusty romans, sad to see that they are no longer doing business. The best one was a "cleaned" hoard where probably 75% of the coins were attributable. The other two hoards were a mix of byzantine, islamic, judaeic, and roman coins. The only complaint I have is that there are too many coins from the Constantine to Arcadius era - in fact one of the hoards had about fifty of the "fel temp reparatio" coins of Constantius II. It did have a rare AE piece of the emperor Jovian, so that was nice, as well as a follis of Julian with the picture of the Apis bull on the reverse.

 

I bought three 1/2 kilo hoards from crusty romans, sad to see that they are no longer doing business. The best one was a "cleaned" hoard where probably 75% of the coins were attributable. The other two hoards were a mix of byzantine, islamic, judaeic, and roman coins. The only complaint I have is that there are too many coins from the Constantine to Arcadius era - in fact one of the hoards had about fifty of the "fel temp reparatio" coins of Constantius II. It did have a rare AE piece of the emperor Jovian, so that was nice, as well as a follis of Julian with the picture of the Apis bull on the reverse.