1909-S VDB PCGS UNC Questionable Color

Read right past the last sentence in your earlier post. OK.... How DO you know that firearms and coins don't play well together???

BTW, I sent my 1909-S VDB in to NGC for conservation at the end of March. I called Customer Service today and they told me that the coin is in for conservation and that it has not been rejected for being a lost cause or else I would have received a "sorry but..." email. My first ray of hope on the ugly duckling!

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

I had a beautiful standing liberty quarter turn black on me in a few years in my gun safe. It was one of the things that led me to this site. When it was explained to me it made perfect sense.... The cleaners we use on firearms are designed to cut copper. When we close up a safe with those chemicals on the firearms the chemicals leach out into the space. If you can smell the chemicals then they are also in the air doing harm to your coins locked up tight with that stuff.

 

That makes sense. Never had coins and guns stored together though but I'll remember that going forward. THANKS!!

 

Well... as I indicated a while back, I was going to send the 1909 S VDB penny to NGC for conservation to see if they could breathe any life into the sad ol' coin. I just found out the results last night and I wanted to pass them along to all you who helped me out. The coin was accepted for conservation and when all was done it graded as MS-63 RB !!!!!!! I'm so happy... appraises about $2150 on NGC's price guide. Now I don't want to sell it, especially for medical bills. Crap!!

Thanks again y'all!

 

Hats off to @Lehigh96 for suggesting conservation services

 

Congratulations! That's great news.

Be sure to post pics so we can compare the before and after.

 

Nice one. Better than just unloading it

 

Great story. Awesome results. Really happy for you. Definitely post the after pix.

 

A warning about submitting your coins to NGC for conservation.

As you can read in the previous entries to this thread things went well with the conservation of my 1909 S VDB penny by NGC... a spotted ugly duckling worth about $700 based on the CoinTalk community input to a NGC conserved coin graded MS-63 RB and listed on NGC's Pricing Guide to be worth about $2150.

Well... the coin was mailed back to me via USPS registered mail on Apr 29th and has sat in the USPS Coppell, TX sorting facility since May 2nd, five days now. That delay has raised my concerns about what happens if it's lost or stolen. A brief Google investigation turned up Coppell's bad reputation for losing packages. So naturally I started thinking about insurance on my package in case it was lost.

I wondered how NGC valued the package on its return trip to me. When I provided my Declared Value on the NGC submission form I used $800 based on the input of this forum. It turns out that the return shipping of a conserved coin uses this same customer Declared Value to set the return shipping insurance regardless how successful the conservation was.

THE LESSON: If you use NGC for conservation of a coin, set your declared value to the most optimistic outcome you can reasonably imagine/afford. If the coin is lost or damaged anywhere in the conservation, grading, or return mail process your declared value will be the maximum you will recover regardless of the conservation success. NGC reserves the right to pay you less, however.

 

That's standard. Your max declared value is what they all use, using the forum for input though that's the real mistake

 

Why so down on taking input from the forum?

 

How has it worked out for you, Dan? Hoping your package has found its way safely!