Help from my Trade $ Friends here! 1878-S- Live or memorex?

A friend sent me the following images and note:

"I'm a part time dealer in New England and a while back we picked up an 1877-S trade dollar from another dealer. Nothing seemed too out of sort with it, until yesterday. We were at a show and a friend of ours showed us a new metal analysis tester he picked up. We put several genuine silver dollars on it to see how it worked, as well as a known counterfeit. Then we put the trade dollar I mentioned on it and it came back as not 90% silver. Everything else checks out - magnet test, weight, diameter, design, etc"...





With different color filter:







Thanks, Jack.

 

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Another one bites the dust. You're back from Europe I see, well okay!

 

No way to tell from those images.

 

From the images, it looks good to me, albeit scrubbed.

 

you said 'Not 90% silver".

What percentage did it show?

 

Honestly, to me it looks genuine, if Brillo'd.

 

Isn't there another non magnetic metal that weighs the same that they were using? I could swear I read about it somewhere.

 

Enought about magnets! From what I've seen on the Internet and in hand, anything attracted by a magnet is not going to look even close to a genuine coin!

 

You may be thinking of tungsten, used to fake gold coins and bars, as it has almost identical atomic weight and is not magnetic.

 

No metal weighs the same as silver when considering the same volume. The closest metals in weight per volume are lead, molybdenum, palladium, and bismuth, but none weigh exactly the same. They are all heavier or lighter to a degree.

source: https://stackerhodler.com/silver-we... metal weighs the same,or lighter to a degree.

 

Simply my "gut feeling" at first view. Fake looking, but what do I know?

 

Well, you could presumably alloy heavier and lighter metals to get an exact match -- and then it would have such different electromagnetic characteristics that it would fail immediately on something like a Sigma.

The last couple I got were apparently silver-plated copper, which I still think might fool a Sigma, but makes the coin about 10% thicker to hit the desired weight.

 

I did say gold.

 

Yes that's probably what it was i read somewhere. I couldn't recall what or when I even read that.