NE Shilling made of lead ---> What is it?

My friend has this NE Shilling made of lead. It allegedly came from a 40-year old collection. It would be nice to know if there is any information available on similar lead NE pieces. (I did look in Breen & found no mention of any famous 19th or 20th Century copies. Of course, I was hoping to find something in Breen describing crude lead patterns but everything I read described coins that were made with considerably more precision than this lead piece. Any comments of ideas about this old lead piece are certainly appreciated.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

Weight is 19.85 grams and the diameter is 32 mm. It certainly feels like lead.

 

looks bogus, a poor copy

 

Are you sure its lead and not pot metal? I have seen cheap pot metal restrikes before from about the 1940-1950's. I have never seen a lead one, but I guess it doesn't surprise me.

 

Looks like pewter to me, which would be the likely choice for a counterfeit.

 

Thanks for looking gentlemen. Apparently the consensus is that it is a cheap/poor copy
folderol from the 1940-50s made of a heavy lead alloy. That is basically what we assumed [but of course we were hoping that it would have been from a famous counterfeiter or pattern piece]. Thanks again for inspecting it.

 

I wonder if the crude style suggests that it's a contemporary counterfeit, akin to the barbaric imitations of Roman coins. I would expect a modern fake to look much more like the real thing, and be made of silver.

As a footnote, I once stopped in to a Boston dealership and the owner had a handful of these for sale, raw, for about 3K apiece. He assured me that they were authentic because, and I quote: it would be very difficult to counterfeit them. Lol.

 

You can't really know what it's made of without an X-ray fluorescence analysis.

 

No, I have seen LOADS of these. They have been faked for not only collectors but the general public for a very, very long time. It might be the singularly most faked US coin. I have seen these faked in the 19th century some, but they really took off with the publication of the Red Book. This was the first "US coin" listed in the redbook, so it became extremely popular. From tourist fakes to cereal box prizes, they made pretty poor copies of these not to fool anyone, just because the general public were aware of them.

It COULD be older Collect, but when I hear hoofbeats I think horses not zebras. There was such a flood of these things made after the introduction of the Redbook I would simply assume post WWII unless proven otherwise.

 

I wasn't aware of that Chris. Thanks for the clarification.

Horses, zebras? Nonsense. It's unicorns I tell you!!