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Message:: [QUOTE="Curtis, post: 6169738, member: 26430"]Many thanks! Video definitely helps with these thick (and darkly patinated) coins. (I'm going to re-photo this coin once circumstances are more amenable to resuming back-and-forth trips to safety depot box!) That's a good point about the differential wear on the obv/rev. I had mostly chalked that up to the more heavily worn reverse dies and weaker reverse strikes I see often (at least on some 2nd/3rd cent types), but you're right the legends are much worse on the reverse, and obv legend is where it would be. I often wonder how tooling large bronze coins ever used to be an accepted practice among collectors in past centuries, but I guess it was a different world then and they felt they were "restoring" them. I never think of it as plus, of course, though at least with tooling from, say, the 19th century or earlier, I can view that as an artifact of how the coin was received in a prior historical period. I still consider it a big net negative, just not nearly as bad as recent tooling, almost always intended to deceive and raise a coin's value. Best case scenario for those coins is that by partial destruction they allow someone to afford a tooled example of a coin they could otherwise never hope to acquire.[/QUOTE]