Just wondering what you think this Lincoln would grade as at NGC? The last three are the sellers pictures which capture the color better than mine.
Plenty of meat on the bone but those spots ...."out damn spot..... out!" I personally would of passed on this due to the corrosion imho.
Nice condition but those spots are a killer. I'd pass but if you already own it, I'd forget about sending it in for grading.
It looks like it's already in a holder, maybe old ANACS? Or NGC? Nobody likes dark copper spots but at least these aren't too prominent. I think NGC would call it 65BN. PCGS is a somewhat tougher but it might earn the same there (which is where I would send it). Lance.
My guess is that it would grade in the MS63/MS64 Brown range. I have a couple other NGC graded Lincolns with spots like those with MS grades.
Looks every bit a technical gem to me. But marketwise? Oh those carbon spots! Still, pretty coin. The spots just throw the eye off going around it. They're like eye-magnets, you know...
I owned a 31-S once that graded MS64 RB and was an absolutely beautiful coin except for a single carbon spot near the date. I was able to buy it at a price probably 25% lower than an equivalent one without the spot. Over time the spot didn't bother me as much as it did in the beginning while building a complete Lincoln set.
Harshly cleaned. I got that impression from all the lines or scratch marks on the obverse of the coin all going in same direction. Sure sign of cleaning.
Okay. Understood. Question though. Should the details of a coin be 'covered up' then? By that I mean keeping it covered in whatever foreign matter that helps hide the true detail of the coin? If so then perhaps deception is more important than a coin's true image?
You grow accustomed to it, just like living next to a garbage dump. Poor analogy. But you get my point. Your eye-movement is thrown off. The whole skillset of the engraver was to control that eye movement, and a spot is controlling it. Different eye movement through the artwork, different feeling imparted, different expression imparted. That's it, in a nut.
Looks like corrosion to me but I'm till learning here. I'm not one of those that claims to know everything. Just trying to ascertain the true nature of the hobby. True detail versus deception. Here we go again with the crazy tracking crap. That post got all screwed up. I ain't fixin it.