For quite a while now I've been wanting to get a nice example of a common date $3 gold piece. I'm looking in the area of AU58, which will fall nicely within my budget. Are there any dates that are known to have a nicer strike that I should pay more attention to?
Well, then, your budget is certainly much healthier than mine! My advice would be to use CoinFacts, and read up on the specific characteristics of dates that interest you (they're all individually hyperlinked on that main page for the type). However, my personal experience with "threeagles" is limited to but one coin, which used to be on my "Holey Gold Hat" years ago. I paid $150-ish for it when I bought it, which wasn't much more than melt at the time. Some folks on PCGS/Collectors Universe told me that even though my example was scary enough to frighten small children, the 1860 was a bit of a "sleeper" date. I wouldn't know. I just thought it was a cool "holey" to hang on my hat. Unfortunately, the 19th century person who murdered the coin (and I don't mean the hole) scrubbed out a potentially interesting old counterstamp when they attacked it. I was never able to make out what that said. PS- clicking on some of the individual CoinFacts pages by date, I didn't see much discussion of strikes- just the finest examples, yada yada yada. Maybe the Breen Encyclopedia discusses some of that. I have a copy of it ... somewhere. But I'll defer to those with deeper pockets more specialized knowledge for other, more detailed advice.
Thanks for the reply. I have been looking on CoinFacts a lot. I've also been following them for a few months on eBay. The problem with that is I'm not getting the opportunity to see them in hand. I just want to be ready when the Whitman show comes around in November. I'm hoping to get 3 new coins for my gold type set. Fingers crossed
I just added an 1874 AU58. NGC Coin Explorer has an excellent write up that helped me out. Check it out!
