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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Hookman, post: 4359094, member: 99642&quot;]The 8 Reales looks like it&#039;s plated and the plating is peeling off. I see and bid on these all the time and have never, ever seen anything like that.As you pointed out, the date and the initials don&#039;t match, and not with anything I could find either.&nbsp; BTW, those initials are not the mintmark. They are called the assayer&#039;s, or the moneyer&#039;s, initials. That&#039;s the guy who weighed the silver before the strike and the coin after the strike and &quot;certified&quot; that they were both legit.&nbsp; The mintmark is the large M with the tiny o over it.&nbsp; It stands for Mexico City, which is actually the oldest mint in the Americas, and it&#039;s still functioning today. At that time Mexico was a colony of Spain.&nbsp; Many of the old Spanish colonies had enormous silver deposits and Spain set up mints in most of the ones that had the silver. It was cheaper to transport finished silver coins than it was to transport raw silver ore.</p><p>It looks to me like a genuine 1806 coin was used to make the mold for the obverse, and a genuine 1801 - 1803 coin (It appears FT was the money man for only 3 years) was used to make the mold for the reverse. Why the counterfeiters didn&#039;t use matching coins to make their molds, I have no idea. Maybe so they themselves wouldn&#039;t be fooled by their own fakes ?</p><p>Really, this is all supposition on my part.</p><p>I&#039;m calling it a fake : Cast and Plated.</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;ve been up all night and I&#039;m not going to go any deeper than that right now. I&#039;m about to go to bed.</p><p><br /></p><p>The sovereigns look like fakes also, though I don&#039;t know much about those.</p><p><br /></p><p>Later.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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