Hi All, I am starting a collection of Large Cents, and came across this one. What would you grade this coin? Is there some kind of lacquer or residue that is helping it give off the pretty blue-ish tone? Or is a natural tone. Any advice would be much appreciated. Cheers.
Looks to me like someone took a wire brush to the coin and then dipped it in something. Maybe MS70 - that leaves a bluish tone on some of the wheaties I have seen. Poor coin.
I am venturing out on a limb with this - I possess a study group of Chinese forgeries of these coins and it is remarkably similar to the 1828 in my group - the colouring suggests that after it was struck it was heated in a furnace or something on a lower setting to "age" it. The characters in the date are spot on for the 1828 I have. They are making really decent copies of these coins and selling them via eBay and other venues to people in the USA etc that then pawn them off on unsuspecting individuals.
The color blue on copper, I suspect just like the coin posted in this thread, often comes from exposure to a chemical like soap. I see nothing to suggest the coin is a forgery, but neither can I rule out the possibility.
It can also come from heat as well. And this one is scary good but it is a fake (or a previously unknown variety which is EXTREMELY unlikely.) The point of leaf is sliightly past center of the second S in STATES. N-8 is the ONLY 1828 variety with that position nothing else even comes close. But when you compare the other leaf positions to -8 they are very close but a couple of them are off. And when you look at the obverse note that star 6 points just slightly to the right of the point of the coronet. On ALL of the 1828's star 6 points either directly at the point of the coronet or slightly LEFT of the point. After that I compared the relationship of the other star points to the denticals and they do not match and of the 12 varieties of 1828. But if you don't do a variety attribution this would probably fool most of the dealers out there (at least from these images.)
Thanks for posting conder. I did not even try to attribute it. I need to make that the first thing I do.