Here is the latest acquisition to my set of G liberty nickels. Not the greatest example, but decent enough, and the price was very right. Also, my album only shows the obverse...:kewl: It was previously in an ANACS slab and I feel it was a bit overgraded, though the TPGs seem to be quite generous in their grades of lower end liberty nickels. Anyways, feel free to comment.
This is a very interesting coin...I like it. The reason I find it interesting is the obverse and reverse have quite a large difference in grade IMHO. I'd say the obverse is a solid VG8. The is nice detail around the rim, and there is a fair amount of "Liberty" still visible. However, the reverse is definitely AG3. The rim is completely obliterated along the nearly the top half of the coin...from about 11 to 3 o'clock. I would call this coin a G4 because the obverse is so nice...but I don't know if I would be willing to pay full G4 price for it because the reverse so so worn. I would definitely pay a premium over AG3 price. Overall, I like it. It is a very nice coin.
I agree with your assessment Richie. ANACS gave it a G-6. I guess they averaged the VG and AG grade and rounded up...lol. I will say though that I've looked at lots of PCGS and NGC G-4s, and almost everyone one of them had an incomplete rim somewhere(mostly on the reverse). Also, on barbercoins.org they infer that the reverse doesnt need to have a full rim to be a G-4. http://www.barbercoins.org/Grading-LN.html I would definitely expect a G-6 to have a full rim though on both sides. However, even though the reverse rim isn't complete, all of the letters are legible and none of them merge with the field. Oh well, it looks pretty darn good in my whitman (obverse display only) book!:hail::hail: And it only cost me $99, which I felt was pretty reasonable.
it's just something you have to grade We encounter many coins where the grade of the obverse is just plain different that the grade of the reverse. The obverse is the money side of the coin (that is unless you get the TPG to mount the coin with the reverse facing forward). You can't just take a pure mathematical average of the obverse & the reverse. The obverse takes the coin to its final grade. IMO the obverse takes this coin directly to VG. If the reverse was AG then it could drag the grade down a click but I think the reverse makes good. It looks like a great coin AND it is a great coin for a Whitman folder where only the obverse is viewed. I can't tell from the photo if there is anything there that might cause ANACS to have net graded it. My guess would have been that there was a VG grade on the ANACS holder. Very best regards, collect89
I haven't been to this page in a while. I forgot to mention that ANACS also gave it a details grade as G-6 cleaned(though the cleaning is not obvious)...so I removed it and put it in the whitman album so it will look like a solid VG-8 to the unknowing viewer. However, I am more of a Dansco fan at heart, so will probably be converting all my nickels to Dansco. Oh, and my whitman album is falling apart completely...probably not too good for the coins.:headbang:
