A few months ago, I came across a beautiful pair of 20 Crown coins from Turks and Caicos (proof and UNC). These coins are large...slightly larger than our Silver Eagles and containing 1.15oz of silver. Knowing nothing about these at the time, but enamored with their beauty, I bought the two for a heck of lot more than they were probably worth. Of course this didn't bother me because I didn't buy them for investment, but rather sentimental reasons....my wife and I spent our honeymoon on the island. I like to collect coins that have sentimental value to them rather than numismatic or bullion value. This way, you don't get caught up so much into the grade or absolute value of the coins because the value is within the eye of beholder. The other reason that these coins were meaningful to me was that they were dated 1976 which was the year that my wife was born. Once again, not caring about price, I sent these two coins off, along with a gold one from the series to NGC for encapsulation. I did this not to add value to the coins, but to rather preserve them. The coins came back nicely slabbed and graded nearly as expected, but the proof silver one came back with all these milky spots on the obverse of the coin. I sent the coin back to NGC and not only did they remove the spots, but I got a nice grade bump as well. These coins have become some of my all time favorite coins and I wanted to share them with you. The first pictures are of the obverse of the coin when I first received it back from NGC and the original grade. The next set of pics are of the "new" coin. This coin, like most proofs, was very hard to get good pics with my primitive camera techniques. There is a lot of glare/reflection from the slab that shows up on the coin, not to mention the reflection of my camera on the coin as well. Of course I showed my wife the coin yesterday when I got it in and she said....nice....now get back to work. :hatch: (If I had an emoticon that had my tail between my legs, I would insert it here) LOL! Thanks for letting me share my story.
Very nice coins! I am wondering how they removed the milky spots from silver - I thought they did not know how to do that? Maybe that was just ASE's. Anyway nice coins to go with good memories - what more can you ask for. Very nice indeed.
Thanks Mark and Richie for the comments. I was wondering that same thing too Mark. I guess that it is better off that I don't know. If you noticed, even the darkness around the rim on the reverse of the coin is mostly gone. Overall, I was extremely satisfied with the outcome and appreciate what NGC did for me at no additional cost.
The reverse design is what initially attracted me to the coin. Wouldn't that be awesome if we had something like this on our US coins? Unfortunately, the design needed to be on a large coin otherwise, as you can kinda tell from the gold coin that it loses its impact. Thanks Mike!
Thanks T$! Also thanks to you and Mike for all the points that you guys are donating. Total World domination is nearly complete.
I really liked the reverse design too, it looks great on the silver proof. As for the credits, I think we have enough credits now to buy CoinTalk lol.
Nice story and great looking coins. I too, am wondering how they got the proof cleaned up so well, but they're known for doing great clean up jobs. Maybe they will put out a book someday.
They are a rather nice design but above and beyond that I realy like the idea behind the purchase and the reason for slabbing them You Sir are a Sentimentalist at Heart :thumb:
