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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Bluegill, post: 282569, member: 1748&quot;]It was a pleasure meeting you, Speedy! I picked you out of the crowd right away. And thank goodness I was right. It would have been a little weird for me to ask some random person, “Hey, are you Speedy?” and been wrong. I’m glad you made it up here.</p><p><br /></p><p>I spent $20. The best bargain I found: </p><p><br /></p><p>There was a 1960-D Franklin half with a price tag of $10, and a 1972 Eisenhower dollar with a price tag of $2. Both of them were in a bin marked “half off,” meaning the Ike was a dollar. I pulled them out and was going to pay the dealer, and he said, “Just give me five for both.”</p><p><br /></p><p>So, I got an Ike at face value (it’s not a good specimen or anything, but it’s more fun than paper) and a Franklin half in EF condition for below current melt value.</p><p><br /></p><p>I had to return in the afternoon after work to take back another one of the coins I purchased, for I became convinced that it was a counterfeit. I wish I’d taken a picture of it so that I could show people what I was talking about. I was a little excited when I first found it: In one dealer’s binder of world coins, he had a couple of pages of 18th and 19th Century reales and half-reales. I’ve been looking for such a coin from the 1730s, because that’s the kind of coin that would have been in common usage in the Colonies when the first of my family came over during that decade. I spotted a 1737 half-real for $18.95, and the dealer said he’d let me have it for $15. It wasn’t in great shape, but that was a good price, so I purchased it.</p><p><br /></p><p>When I got back to work I looked at it a few times, and became troubled. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that this was a replica. Finally, I became sure that it wasn’t just a fake, it was a poorly done fake that screamed “sucker!”</p><p><br /></p><p>The details on the coin were poor. There was metal between the bars on many of the letters. Importantly, there were bubble-like raised nodules of metal, which is what would occur if the coin were cast in a mold that had bubble-holes in it that had formed when the mold-making material had set. Most damning, there was a broken flange of metal protruding from the top edge of the coin from where (I suspect) metal fed into the mold.</p><p><br /></p><p>At least, this is what my eyes told me. </p><p><br /></p><p>I took the coin back, explained to the dealer my concern, and handed it to him. He looked at it with his loupe and mentioned something about the quality of the coins at that time varying considerably, and then he gave me my money back. So I have no problem with this dealer, except that I think it was a seriously problematic coin that he himself should have caught. There were a few other world coins I bought from him that I’m satisfied with.</p><p><br /></p><p>I was very excited when I first saw the coin: A textbook case of getting carried away. But I’m happy with myself for spotting it in time to do something about it.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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