Introduction

For those who have seen the materials I sell there can be no doubt I deal in some of the best quality coins on the net. I can only do this if I feel confident I can grade the coins I buy accurately and then resell them at a profit. Once in a while I get a message from someone who strongly disagrees with the grade I have given a coin, and there are occassions on which I too disagree with the grades given otherwise interesting coins I see offered on eBay or other auction sites. Now, with the right view, one can still make truly good buys of numismatic collectors items, as well as numismatic investment items.

The internet is, like the world, filled with voices. Some of these voices are dedicated to the truth, some are not, some are dedicated to making information available and easy to understand, others attempt to hide their ignorance in fear, confusion and disinformation. This is as true of numismatics as it is of any other area of special knowledge.

I have been collecting, grading and selling coins, in one fashion or another, for over 23 years. In that time I have seen pretty much all the nefarious practices that coin dealers, collectors and brokers can engage to maximize their profits, or minimize their losses. Some of these practices are simply venal, such as "sliding" - the practice of moving a coin slightly up in grade when selling it, and slightly down in grade when buying - and others are downright fraudulent, such as counterfeiting, or "brushing" "cleaning" "dipping", etc.

For the collector or investor, and for the dealer also, it is important to understand some very basic information about coin grading, manufacturing and processing as well as the processes by which fraud is worked on buyers of coins at all levels. Additionally, many very beautiful coins are passed and left off the market because their strike characteristics resemble "problems" of one kind or another and buyers are spooked because they do not know the difference between a "strike" based characteristic and a "post strike" mark of some kind. Finally, some coins of extraordinary quality languish in the conservative hesitance of "professional" graders to give a coin the grade it truly deserves in defference to a standard that is subject to their own subjective hesitance to be "wrong".

In response to all of these I am planning, for all those who are interested, a simple but informative guide to issues that I have raised in the above. I ask the reader to bear in mind that I too, as everyone in numismatics, am human and capable of error. Likewise, I do not know everything. However, what I do know, from scholarship, from research, from practical experience I will share with my customers and my readers within eBay.

Chapter One - Striking Coins: Every Coin is a Damaged Planchet

Anyone who has ever sold a coin, at whatever level, has heard the words, "...the problem is..." leading into some lengthy explanation as to why the coin you wish to sell, or to buy, is "damaged" and therefore not as valuable as you would like it to be. Why else would there be an effort to establish a scientific and objective standard for grading coins from Perfect (MS - 70 or PR - 70) all the way down to "junk metal"?

Of course what no one bothers to tell you, possibly because they have never thought of it appropriately, but EVERY COIN IS A DAMAGED PERFECT PLANCHET. In short, every mark on a coin represents damage to otherwise flawless metal planchets, including the devices. The question is not "...is there damage to the surface of the coin..." that is given, there is, if it is a coin at all. Rather, the question is "...when did the damage occur..." in the coin striking and distribution process. For the collector, and therefore the final destination of all numismatic articles, the value and enjoyment of the coin lies in the area of when the damage to the surface of the planchet occurred. Did it happen to the planchet before it was collared and struck? Did it happen at the moment of collaring and striking? Did it happen after the now struck, perfect coin, dropped into its collection bin at the mint? In the answers to these questions lie the answers to many of the "problems" that are seen in coins of all types and metals.

Simply put coins are created by beating a design into a flat metal disk and that is it. No matter how much sophistication and quality you put into the process that is what happens and because that is what happens there are certain things that we can say with certainty about the results of this process.

First, the dies that are used to impress their devices on the surface of the disk have to be of a material harder than the metal used in the coins.

Second, the dies are subjected to the same pressures as the metal disks being struck and are subject to be damaged over time in the process.

Finally, until about the twentieth century, the only metal established of sufficient strength to adequately strike gold, silver and bronze has been iron, or the iron alloy we call steel. Each of these metals are also subject to rapid oxidation and corrosion of their surfaces. There is a reason this has been noted. It is possible, actually even fairly frequent, that damage to the surface of a coin unintended solely by the devices impressed on the dies, can and does occur in any number of ways that, without very close examination, will look for all the world like the kind of damage the coin receives as a matter of normal wear after being struck and put into distribution.

However, there are ways to tell the differences between damage inflicted as a part of the striking process and damage inflicted by wear and this is an extraordinarily import  distinction to make when dealing in high quality coins of the uncirculated conditions.

Now, this is important; any coin can recieve any number of  surface damage marks and never see "circulation". All uncirculated means is that the coin never made it out of the banking system and into the general circulation for long enough to experience "circulation" type wear. There are ten levels of uncirculated grade between MS-70 (Perfect) and MS-60 (lowest level of uncirculated and containing some remarkably damaged coins).

So, in summary, we now know that the questions we ask of the surface of a coin that is purporting to be uncirculated, is not "...is there any damage?" but rather should be "... is the damage on this coin pre-strike, strike, or post-strike inflicted damage?" The next installment of this guide will examine the characteristics of pre-strike, strike and post-strike damage and how a close examination can reveal which is which...