Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Cherd, post: 8520507, member: 24754&quot;]These types of designations occur on a spectrum for ancient coins, and NGC draws their lines based on different criteria. All ancients are cleaned by modern coin standards, so this isn&#039;t a problem. Depending on how you define it, all ancients could also be considered tooled (bronzes anyway), as some kind of device is almost always used to scrape the surfaces clean.</p><p><br /></p><p>This kind of thing becomes problematic for collectors when the scraping goes beyond the dirt and starts removing metal or patina for the purpose of improving the aesthetics of the coin. NGC will allow somewhat excessive scraping that is used to flatten the fields, which they call &quot;Smoothing&quot;. They are more strict about this kind of thing on the devices though, where smoothing becomes &quot;Tooling&quot; (can&#039;t smooth the face and neck). NGC won&#039;t slab tooled coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>And then, of course, there are the extreme cases where someone literally re-sculps the bust (like cutting in some hair). This is also simply called &quot;Tooling&quot;, which is kind of problematic because NGC doesn&#039;t specify the extent of the designation. (In my opinion, there is a big difference between a smoothed neck and a re-sculpted bust)[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in