Forgery Hunt: What about my Geta Sestertius?

While I´m at it (and have my new camera at hand)...
What do you think about my Geta Sestertius?







Are all those those little pits traces of corrosion or the dreaded CASTING BUBBLES ?

On the other hand the edge looks OK to me and it does have what looks like a substantial flan crack, which should point towards a struck coin.

Also the detail (especially on the Fortuna) seem to be too crisp for a cast in my eyes. But what about the letters?

And what about the bright yellow brassy color of this coin (which I adore personally)? Does it match the original Orichalcum tone of 211 aD or should´t that have been darker or more reddish by then?

Could the bright and glossy surface have been achieved by cleaning and coating it with some sort of cellulose lacquer in the past?

Apart from it´s flaws (pitting and crack) and the "clean" surface (which actually is a pro for me) I find this coin almost too good to be true in terms of style, high relief, and relative rarity for what I paid for it.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

I think it's okay

 

look legit to me.. it's got real nice splits/cracks and shows signs of corrosion along with no seam in the edge.

 

Corrosion. The flan crack comes to your aid here is analysing the coin. On a cast you would find that the flan crack doesn't make it through the coin.

 

I'm happy to say I agree with the others!!

The lack of patina has exposed the environmental damage/corrosion and does not appear to be evidence of 'cast bubbles'.

 

Not a cast and not a bad coin at all.

 

This is not in reply to the coin in question but about cracks. While it is most often the case that cracks are not complete or do not go into the coin on both sides on a cast, it is not entirely true. Some high quality casts can have full cracks that go into the coin to some degree and on both sides. The cracks are always softer in nature compared to cracks with struck examples and lack metal dispersion and crystalization. Similarly, while a seam or sprue trace is a good indication of a cast, not all casts pieces have sprue remnants or visible seams.

I believe someone with the name of Tesorillo? (name or website) had a very good write up on fakes at one time which covered cracks in hi-res and struck vs cast. If someone has a link or info on that (if it is sharable) it would be probably benefit a lot of people here.

 

Definitely legit. Someone has recently used electrolysis to clean what was, before treatment, a heavily encrusted coin. Judging by all the pitting, my guess is that the coin was probably unidentifiable--an ugly, corroded blob--before it got zapped. Each of the bits represents an area where the original metal had combined with oxygen and other chemicals in its immediate environment to form a new substance. Electrolysis removes these foreign substances along with the patina, leaving a shiny but pitted coin. So, yes, the bright gold color is more or less the original color of the coin.

A lot of people shudder when anyone suggests restoring a coin via electrolysis, but in the case of your coin, someone was able to uncover a nice sestertius that otherwise would have been just an unknown mass of corroded metal. As to whether or not you should get something better, I'd say that depends on your budget.

And you coin will repatinate and darken over time, although it may take many years. If you want to keep its shiny, golden color, you'd need to figure out some way to keep oxygen from reacting with the surface metal.