Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;BC Chicago, post: 2458805, member: 80070&quot;]Thanks for the gracious reply, Superdave. I should have taken the sensibilities of the true afficianado into account from the beginning, and explained up front that none of the coins in my study had ever been professionally graded, and that my &quot;ratings&quot; were actually &quot;groupings&quot; for a special purpose and accordingly adjusted. I&#039;m strictly an amateur when it comes to numismatics. When I was a kid in the 1960&#039;s, my grandfather gave me some Morgan silver dollars for Christmas (1964 was, I believe, when the Treasury released a huge volume of them to the public). I loved them (and still think that they are the most beautiful coin the US has ever minted) but, alas, <span style="color: #ff0000">Keep political comments out of threads Edited, </span>the price of silver skyrocketed and I foolishly sold them. (I was in college and needed the cash.) Now in my later years, I&#039;ve decided to put together a nice collection of &#039;Americana&#039;...&nbsp; (coins from a day when our money was still actually worth something) for my children to appreciate. Needless to say, my Morgan dollars are the centerpiece of it all. Given the concern these days about counterfeiting, and that I&#039;m a metallurgist with access to an excellent lab scale to calibrate my home scale against, I decided to run a small study, just to approximate the weight loss due to abrasion and erosion from normal circulation. When it comes to bag marks and handling scratches, I strongly suspect that no appreciable metal is lost (unless due to a very severe gouge, which would be uncommon and visually obvious). As for circulation wear, I was happy to find that, for any decent coin of VF or better, one could probably take &lt;=1% weight loss as a good standard for checking a coin&#039;s authenticity. Whether or not this would hold true for other types of coins with different materials and designs, I would hesitate to say without running a similar review.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in