Time To Address My Shortcoming

I avoid buffalo nickels. Not because I don't like the series. But rather, I cannot for the life of me reasonably grade the series. Is it a mental block?? Why does this series confound me so badly? Do I just need to go purchase a batch of low cost, common date buffalo's and start studying them?

 

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Maybe PCGS Photograde online or similar would help.

 

I agree they are kind of weird to grade. I have never been great at them either, even though I consider them to be our greatest circulating US coin design.

Simply beautiful coin. An old dealer had a phrase about them I loved, "a quarter's worth of design on a nickel."

 

Great series, definitely worth studying. Most are not very expensive so it may be worth your time to get some low grade and practice as you said.

 

I agree that they are challenging. Lots of variation in strike.
Discerning a cleaning seems more difficult to me than other series also.
I suppose looking at lots of professionally graded coins should help.

 

Yep, that's the way it works.
Used to be that you had to see the tip of the horn to qualify for a VF.
That criterion faded away (along with the horn's tip).
I think it's slowly returning, but ...

 

I will only buy Buffaloes with a full horn, but I'm a horny kind of guy!

 

Buffalophobia as a shortcoming...hmmm.

I do admire a well struck gem from this series, but have a low tolerance for also-rans, in spite of owning a few.

 

Read your Red Book and find the key. You are missing something in the grades. Sooner or later, it will click.

 

When I started collecting Buffalo's I found the strike differences the most difficult thing to judge. On one coin, the obverse was MS while on the reverse, it was VF due to strike. Some I looked at that the seller self-graded as MS I called BS because of the strike quality. I feel like it is an ongoing struggle that I will continue to have, so I understand where you are coming from Randy.

 

Fraser's nickel design would have made a really beautiful silver coin & I suspect the difficult/hardness of the nickel alloy has much to do w/ quality of each date's strike.
However, I'm sure many of the other CT members have a wiser 'read' than mine.
J.T.

 

I hear ya! I laugh at what some sellers of raw Buffalo's describe as MS; most severely over grade. On most raw coins I will never offer more than AU value unless it is obviously MS. The only raw buffalo's I buy have solid dates and full horns. I've been trying to complete a Dansco Buffalo album but find some key dates hard to find fitting my criteria. Probably most like that are in a slab.

 

To be fair, that's really just par for the course for raw coins and not unique to buffalos

 

Agree

 

On a slightly different but related topic, may I say something about the obverse of the coin? I suppose all the senior experts here already know this, but I didn't and when I found out, I thought it was very interesting. So let me share this with other newbies like me. The Indian head on the Buffalo Nickel is a composite portrait of THREE different Indian Chiefs: Iron Tail, Two Moons, and Big Tree.

 

Buy Q. David Bower's book on Buffalo nickels.

 

The’re an odd coin. Tuff

 

You are so helpful