VAMWorld 2.0

Thanks but solving the VAM 21 mystery seems to be elusive. Hopefully LVA can help sort out whether or not it is the mystery coin or has been superseded by one of the other two.

I am back on schedule and the January discussion is up for viewing. This month I tackled VAMs 10, 21, and 25 by looking at the reverse dies and drawing some conclusions. There is one mystery coin that COULD be VAM 21, but I doubt it. I am still convinced that VAM 21 has been superseded by VAM 25 or ...

Looks a bit like album toning where the rim was in primary contact with something like cardboard and there is less toning toward the center. I don't know if we are calling that AT or NT but it is a really nice coin. Thanks for the warning on the TPG.

I was a lowball collector for a few years and I found PCGS to be very unpredictable on this front. The closer you get to PO-01 the tougher it is to get things graded, UNLESS, you happen to hit the right grader on the right day. Some coins I submitted ten or twelve times before they passed and includ...

My last of the year, picked on the Bay.

There is an excellent biography of Redfield on Amazon and if you read it you will get more of the story.

Thanks, I had not considered collar damage and that might just be it. This is very different than other ejection markings I have seen.

I believe the doubling is machine also and probably not related to the notches on the denticles. But the doubling does not have a complete flat look to it like I often see. The star doubling may be a little of both die and production doubling.

I was going back through some coins and looked at the VAM 1I we found last month. On the reverse there are a series of notches on the denticles that do not look like the other ejection marks I have seen before. They seem to go around the upper portion of the coin only from about 9 o'clock to 3 o'clo...

hard to tell on these photos but we had some VAM 28s early on that had odd swirls on them. JB at first thought this might be from grease left on the die, but later had some different thoughts. If you look under the eagle's right wing on this coin http://www.1881o.com/25689508_65dm_28.html you will s...

John: My first reaction was to say that a 1-10 scale would be more quickly grasped by the most people. But my second reaction was that a lot of people who "aren't from around here" would equate the 1-10 scale with desirability/rarity – which is inevitably suggesting value. And then there's the unde...

JB I don't see how this is doable given the population of most issues. I have been reminded several times by LVA that even on the 1881-O with our inventory we are looking at a fraction of the minted population and more discoveries are always there. It seems to me that the PL/DMPL population is alway...

I really think these are separate items. I find it very helpful to have a microscope I can examine coins under that is different than one I take closeups of coin features. It just seems more practical for daily use. I have a dinolite and it works well for closeups but I would not want to use it just...

Well thanks to JB we finally finished up the 56 coins in the hopper and now have everything up on the web site. There are some nice toned coins in this group which can be easily accessed. I started back in on the die crack analysis with VAM 1I and set up a lot of pages in the web site to continue th...

Great examples and pix, and a good teaching lesson for us all.

I would suggest that we add a designated researcher for each series where they exist in an attempt to get folks to "own" them. We need some in depth research on a lot of varieties and I think this might encourage folks to step up.

VamHelsing wrote: ↑

Wed Dec 19, 2018 5:52 pm

Looks "Baggy" to me...

Looks baggy to me also, but if you notice all the textile lines seem to be very straight. Just looks a little too good to be true. But then again on a coin like this there would be little to no monetary gain to fake it, so it is probably genuine.

What do they cost?

I agree but it makes me a little suspicious. The bag would have to have been flat against the obverse for that consistency and I have never seen one that complete.

"A better way not involving off-label use of medical imaging equipment would be an optical profilometer, which can be sub-micron accurate, and is meant to do this sort of measurement." I like it, but why don't we do it.