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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GeorgeM, post: 1077214, member: 28550&quot;]My guess is that it&#039;s a modern reproduction of a pattern piece. It would be stamped &quot;Copy&quot; if it were made in the US (to reduce confusion) but manufacturer&#039;s outside of the US often choose not to put a distinguishing mark.</p><p><br /></p><p>If it&#039;s legitimate, the coin would be worth $1,000-$6,000 (probably on the lower end, since this appears to be circulated):</p><p><a href="http://coinauctionshelp.com/Pattern_Guides/goloidbandedcaplibertydollar.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://coinauctionshelp.com/Pattern_Guides/goloidbandedcaplibertydollar.html" rel="nofollow">http://coinauctionshelp.com/Pattern_Guides/goloidbandedcaplibertydollar.html</a></p><p><br /></p><p>You might want to ask your neighbor if he&#039;s missing any VERY expensive coins (or if his wife/gf might have gotten angry with him and thrown things over the fence). Barring that, send it in for certification to find out if its real.</p><p><br /></p><p>Here&#039;s what I found on the Goloid trial pieces: </p><p>&quot;Goloid is an alloy of silver, gold and&nbsp; copper patented by Dr. William Wheeler Hubbell on May 22, 1877 (U.S.&nbsp; patent #191,146). The patent specifies 1 part gold (about 3.6%), 24&nbsp; parts silver (about 87.3%), and 2.5 parts copper (about 9.1%, all by&nbsp; weight); however, the patent also states that &quot;The proportions may be&nbsp; slightly varied&quot; and goes on to specify that the silver portion can&nbsp; range from 20 times to 30 times that of the gold, and the copper could&nbsp; range from one-eighth to one-twelfth (from 12.5% to 8.33%) of the total&nbsp; mixture. The patent specifies that the metals be separately melted, then&nbsp; mixed, along with &quot;sulphate of sodium or sulphate of potassium&quot; in the&nbsp; amount of one part sulfate to one thousand parts metal. The alloy, in&nbsp; varying proportions (sometimes slightly out of these specifications),&nbsp; was used by the United States Mint to strike pattern dollars, sometimes&nbsp; called &quot;metric dollars&quot; (some were marked with &quot;metric&quot; in the coin&nbsp; design, while all had metal proportions and total coin weight as design&nbsp; features) from 1878 to 1880. Patterns of the same design were struck in&nbsp; other metals, including aluminum, copper, normal coin silver, lead, and&nbsp; white metal.</p><p><br /></p><p>In the end, goloid was rejected as a coinage metal because it could not&nbsp; be distinguished from the normal U.S. 90% silver coin alloy without&nbsp; chemical analysis, thus inviting counterfeiters to use silver-copper&nbsp; alloys alone to make lower-value copies.&quot;[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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