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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;SuperDave, post: 2761742, member: 1892&quot;]Honestly, yeah, just that. You can eliminate a whole lot of the &quot;error&quot; by actively participating in a community like this - it&#039;s the great advantage of modern numismatics over how it used to be done - but there will still be &quot;trials.&quot; Few among us bat 1.000 with purchases, despite long experience. Here&#039;s a case in point:</p><p><br /></p><p>At the Baltimore numismatic show earlier this year, I found a New Brunswick Penny Token which really appealed to me. It was in a mylar flip (obviously, etiquette says you don&#039;t remove it from the flip to inspect) and looked pretty nice even under my loupe. It showed a little bit of &quot;crud,&quot; but not bad for a circulated coin minted 163 years ago, and the price was fair, so I snagged it.</p><p><br /></p><p>[GALLERY=media, 5843]1854Obv1 by SuperDave posted Apr 5, 2017 at 7:00 PM[/GALLERY]</p><p><br /></p><p>[GALLERY=media, 5844]1854Rev1 by SuperDave posted Apr 5, 2017 at 7:01 PM[/GALLERY]</p><p><br /></p><p>That&#039;s about what I saw in hand at the show. Part of my imagery process is to shoot each coin under differing lighting, because despite our best efforts digital imagery tends to &quot;spin&quot; the appearance of a coin in one direction or the other, and this is what I saw under a different lighting arrangement:</p><p><br /></p><p>[GALLERY=media, 6473]1854alternate by SuperDave posted Jun 6, 2017 at 12:12 PM[/GALLERY]</p><p><br /></p><p><i>That</i> was disturbing, and despite careful inspection I hadn&#039;t seen it at the show. It&#039;s my normal practice to rinse every raw coin I purchase in acetone anyways - <b>after</b> the initial round of images - and with that interesting evidence in hand I gave this one the full acetone soak-rinse-repeat cycle. This was the end result:</p><p><br /></p><p>[GALLERY=media, 5845]1854Obv2 by SuperDave posted Apr 5, 2017 at 7:02 PM[/GALLERY]</p><p><br /></p><p>[GALLERY=media, 5846]1854Rev2 by SuperDave posted Apr 5, 2017 at 7:03 PM[/GALLERY]</p><p><br /></p><p>The coin had been oiled to hide verdigris. The oil had soaked into the green, altering its&#039; appearance to that of more-acceptable &quot;crud&quot; (for lack of a better word). The dealer from whom I bought it had been similarly deceived - the flip was not in his handwriting, and the coin was obviously purchased in the flip for resale, so I hold him blameless.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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