Hi everyone. I purchased my first spanish coins and not sure whether they are fake and I overpaid. Would appreciate any input. Thanks.
Howdy Numismatist - Welcome to the Forum !! There are some details that do not match, most notably the column bases. And the coins have what might be some casting bubbles. I would suggest you weigh them, but I am leaning towards them being fake.
Weight I weighed the coins on a food scale that doesn't go beyond 500g and neither of the coins went past 30g. So in this sense the coins seem to be a proper weight. What alarmed you abou the pillars?
By weight he meant to get a fairly exact reading. Each coin should be very close (within about 5%) of 27.07 grams. A measured weight to the nearest 1 gram is not sufficient to draw conclusions.
The round rings at the bottom of the columns are known as tori, the tori sit on a plinth. What bothers me about them is that the coins of this period should have 3 tori, yours have 4. Now the pics are not good enough for me to see other details with any clarity. But given the inaccuracy in the columns I suspect there are others. That's why I asked for the weight. If you don;t have an accurate scale, you can take to a jewelry store and get them weighed to within X.01gm.
Hi. I couldn't get the coins weighed but upon further inspection they have only 3 tori. I found this website that lists the different spanish dollars. Mine look very simila to the ones that are posted. The only oddity I dont like about my 1808 coin is that the top "slice" seems to be made of a different material. Is this a part of the manufacturing process?
I'm thinking the odd discontinuity could be a planchet flaw. Is it a different color? By the way another picture you could post to help evaluate the pieces is a closeup of a section of the rim.