Morgan and toned experts need apply.

Good choice.

 

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There is nothing wrong with buying raw Morgan dollars at shows where you can inspect them in hand, but even with FleaBay return policies protecting the buyer, you can still end up spending money for return shipping that you could have applied toward a nicer coin at a show.

Chris

 

+1 looks like a shake & bake to me. Sorry I would pass

 

AU Details . AT as the toning sure doesn't look like anything I've ever seen . Pass .

 

AU/AT coin. maybe $20 bucks. $200??...LOL!

 

I don't like the toning way to expensive I would stick with slabbed morgans if you want toned coins

 

Wise decision. I specialize in Morgans. EVERY seller grossly overstates condition. PCGS & NGC would give this one VF20. More than half hairlines worn off or worn flat. AT for sure...

 

VF20? With no wear on the tops of the wings, eagle's head or lower leaves? That's rather brutal.

 

Really? Not to call you out but please explain your vf20 estimate.

 

The reverse almost always wears better on the Morgans. This one has significant wear on the obverse. If there's a difference in the sides, graders always go by the poorer side. They err on the side of caution.

 

How does only one side wear? The reverse doesn't "wear better." Both sides wear equally, like all coins.

 

Glad you clarified that. I was beginning to think I had slept in physics class more than I thought.

 

The first big problem with grading Morgans is that obverse and reverse strikes, or both, vary across a huge range of quality. The second problem is, so do the dies.

Given the frequency with which they clashed and cracked, its common to see a brand-new die on one face and a worn one on the other. This makes for a coin which already looks "worn" to an extent on one face while the other seems strongly-struck. And then there are the New Orleans strikes.

So, this coin. First off, the obverse image isn't really up to grading; I don't see enough of the upper hair detail in focus to make any determination whatsoever of grade from it. I_do_see wear in the hair at the ear; if this were strike weakness I would expect a less-obvious demarcation between hair and ear; in this image a clear "dark" line exists there, and the way light plays on that area hints at the roundness of wear as opposed to the flatness of weak strike. The other obvious places I expect to see wear first - the leaves and cotton bolls - aren't sharp enough to come to conclusions.

That leaves the reverse. In one sense, MisterWD is sorta right there - the reverse almost always looks "better" on Morgans. But the conclusion I draw from that is the exact opposite of his:

Morgan reverses are usually the better "tell" of real-world wear. That's because they wear more "delicately," with more granularity, than obverses do to my eye.

Start with a vertical band from the eagle's neck feathers, down the breast, the legs, talons, and the largest two leaves of the wreath. If those lower leaves show full center detail and the talons show roundness, you have a decently-struck coin. They "flatten" as quickly as anything does on a weakly-struck Morgan reverse; the right side of the left leaf, and the eagle's left (viewer's right) talon go first. If well-struck, those leaves retain detail down into VF. That vertical band is also the first place to show wear, but by the time one reaches EF or so I expect the neck feathers - even in smaller images like these - to show visible wear. I'm also expecting the lines which cross the top edges of the wings - roughly horizontally even with the beak, you can see them here - to have disappeared. They should be gone before the breast feathers are.

At VF - even a good VF - many of the neck feathers are gone, and I expect to see few center lines on wreath leaves, certainly not the larger ones. I expect the wingtips to have begun flattening - certainly not as sharp as the eagle's right here. The upper part of the junction between breast and eagle's right feather should be about to merge.

For this coin, there's no way the images support anything more firm than "AU-ish." But honestly, I don't see enough missing detail to think I'd go any lower than gEF in higher-resolution pics.

As a basic generalization, I tend to grade Mint State Morgans by the obverse, and circulated ones by the reverse.

 

App

 

This is the mantra that got me in trouble with the shipwreck unc details coin dave

That was a special case though

 

I'm in agreement with you. $200 can get you something a lot nicer!

 

Keep in mind, though, that was a pretty simplistic explanation on my part. I never even mentioned what varying levels of strike quality, and die age mismatches between faces, do to the equation. You approach the coin in exact opposite fashion when it's the reverse as the weaker die, and grade mostly from the obverse. That was all about relatively fresh dies and a decent strike.