Searching through my junk boxes and old albums from my previous years of coin collecting (long before I became a bullion stacker) I've made some interesting discoveries. Yesterday I found an old grimy Krugerrand, but today I did a little more digging through the pile and I found this: Doesn't get more worn and grimy than this. Poor old Edward VII saw a lot of use back in the day, which is probably how I ended up with the coin....being a 20-something broke college student on a budget looking to buy what the coin dealers were willing to offer the best deals on to get rid of.
Lol I have done the same. Digging through one of the SDBs and found a baggy of 6 similar coins, European gold. No memory whatsoever of buying them.
Oh those were the days, before the pound plummeted from $4.87 to near parity with the dollar! How the mighty have fallen...
That's what I like about these old gold coins. You can very easily determine the value of each currency back then by comparing one coin to another another. This one is just a tad smaller than a $5 half eagle, so in my mind I had estimated that $1 equaled 4.78 Pounds. Thank you for confirming that I wasn't that far off. That's one of the great things about the gold standard, you could travel from one country to another and immediately figure out the exchange rate by just weighing the coin from the other country and looking at the value assigned to it, and comparing it to yours. And if you were in the Latin Monetary Union things were even easier than that... you didn't even need basic head math to figure things out.
It's hard to remember sometimes what I picked up 12 to 20 years ago when I was actively collecting old world/US coins. I hadn't really examined this collection in 10+ years. I put it aside and moved on to collecting other things, so now I'm just getting around through sorting it. Most of it is nothing special, low value world coins and some low value old US coins. But I've found a few pleasant surprises. I'm about 90% through with the sorting. So there's still a 10% chance I'll find something else valuable I've forgotten about. Its been slow going because I don't have any spare time to sort this stuff out except at night after I put my child to bed.
A lot less grimy after acetone bath. It had some pretty dark areas which I think were a mixture of PVC and dirt and now it's nice and clean. Getting rid of the grime will definitely never make it an uncirculated coin, but it improved what's actually there.
