The first of three batches arrived today and it was what I had expected. A couple of decent coins, a few so-so and a few slugs. You can see the range of sizes that made up the "25 uncleaned ancients". This is what they looked like when they arrived: After a rinse in distilled water: Close-ups of the better ones:
Looks like there will be some keepers. Im surprised how some already show detail via the distilled water.
You can see in the first pic how much dirt was on them. All it took was a rinse to get it off. I don't know how much better these will turn out but I'll try to clean the nicer ones to see what they're like. A few are already heavily pitted. I've seen coins from the two sellers' batches at shows and some of the coins are incredible. I have two more coming in the next week or so.
Put some effort into the third from the last and see if you can identify it, I doubt even it will be worth what you paid for the lot but it is an emperor most beginners don't have. See if you can get that brown patch off the face without ruining the eye. Don't follow the link below until you have given a fair shot of IDing it yourself: http://www.acsearch.info/record.html?id=71929
