I Need Guidance in Determining VAMs

I finally got myself a new edition of the VAM encyclopedia.
I decided to take some time today and ID some VAMs.
I started with a reasonable coin (graded AU-55) thinking that all the necessary diagnostics would be there making it easy to identify.
After an hour I still didn't know what I had.
And that's just one coin!

My max magnification is a 10x loupe.

What I need is some helpful hints so that I'm not flopping around like a fish out of water.

 

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I am a little confused, I dont own that book but I assume thay are sorted by year?? You can go to vamworld.com and sort vams by year and mint. Then simply compare photos to your coin. Thats what I did when I ended up with a ngc ms65 morgan that had some crazy die cracks, I compared pics and found out it was a e12 or soemthing
rctoners.com

 

.........have you visited here?

http://www.vamworld.com/

 

.........and here?

http://vamquest.com/

 

If you are having trouble like this it's probably not

If you are having trouble like this it's probably not a very valuable coin as far as the variety goes.
Yes, it's hard to attribute but if your having to search that hard maybe the coins not a VAM's at all.

The whole major point with varieties and errors is they need to be seen and they need to be fairly significant - otherwise why would they warrent attention?

Many guys new and old on here are not only searching coins with no major die varieties in that year/mint but looking waaaaaay to close at stuff and then letting their imaginations run rampant posting stuff on Coin Talk that is just slowing down their learning because they are not heeding our advice.
Now, folks can learn anyway they want to but how hard you make it is up to each person.

First find the variety on the coin - rule out any possibility of normal minting procedures that could have caused it then go to the reference material and then prove it by die markers.

 

grizz, thanks for pointing me to those websites.

It's quickly become clear that I need to step back and prep myself better.
So I'll take the VAM encyclopedia, sit down in my recliner and read the introductory chapters MUCH more closely.
This may take a while since I tend to fall asleep when I sit in my recliner. :goof:

 

.........my pleasure, kanga.

 

It was suggested in a post above that maybe your coin is not a VAM - but that is not correct - because every Morgan and Peace Dollar the US Mint struck is a VAM.

 

That's what I thought, but not having spent enough time reading the book I wasn't sure.

 

I did not know that either so why not call them Morgan

I did not know that either so why not call them Morgan and Peace dollars then? If VAM does not stand for a particular numbered variety why bother?
We don't do it with any other series do we?
I have the book in here but Morgans and Peace dollars bore me so bad I've never really read it, maybe I should.

 

Kanga, a good book to purchase is the Fey and Oxman book, titled "The Top 100 Morgan Dollar Varieties: The VAM Keys" It is the size of a tiny notepad and fits very nicely into a shirt pocket or pants pocket. It is very neatly organized by date and VAMs. I carry it whenever I am out looking for coins or at a show. You never know when you will run into the opportunity to buy a Morgan and you could quickly look it up whether or not there is a major variety for a particular date.

 

The first Morgan I tried to determine the VAM for had some attributes of a particular VAM, but not all.
That's what caused me grief.

 

Here ya go Kanga. Lets start you off with an easy one.

 

Looks like an 1888-O VAM-4

 

See, that wasn't that hard....