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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Tom Maringer, post: 172071, member: 7033&quot;]<b>Slabbed... why?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>I will never own a slabbed coin. If I can&#039;t touch a coin, then it&#039;s not worth having. I want to hold it in my hand, flip it in the air to see if it &quot;rings true&quot;, heft it and feel the edges. Slabbing is just a way of removing a coin one step from reality... it is no longer a coin once it&#039;s slabbed... it&#039;s merely a &quot;collectible&quot;... it may as well be a die-cast toy car or a painted plate.&nbsp; Have people forgotten how to spot fakes by their feel and the sound of their ring? </p><p><br /></p><p>And you can&#039;t weigh a coin or test its density once it&#039;s slabbed. Speaking of which... I&#039;ve been seeing an awful lot of supposed ancient silver coins that are not only fake coins... they&#039;re fake silver. They weigh about half of what the standard weight for the type should be. I have not done a certified metallurgical analysis, but from density and chemical tests I&#039;d say they were a zinc/aluminum alloy, probably made from junk car parts. The color is good and the modeling is decent. If they&#039;re slabbed or held in a flip it&#039;s hard to tell, but if you hold it in your hand it instantly feels light. I think these are probably originating in the Middle East, particularly Jordan. I base this last on the fact that a colleague of mine does archaeological field work in Jordan every summer, and says his that the diggers he hires moonlight as &quot;treasure hunters&quot;. They go out into the desert, and come back in a week with 1000 or 2000 &quot;Roman&quot; coins... every time!&nbsp; They joke about how they have this great spot (ha ha) where they &quot;find&quot; (ha ha) the same number of coins every time they go out. Making the coins is the easy part, the key, they tell him, is the aging process. Everybody has their own secret recipe, which usually involves urine, bleach, ashes, and sand, among other things, and some sort of slow cooking over a fire. </p><p><br /></p><p>Anyway... these guys sit around the campfire and have a good laugh about people who buy these things without ever touching them, because that makes the faking job so much easier.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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