Best Of

Got this one sitting next to my computer right now. Picked it up at my PO box a couple of days ago.

Well, a huge improvement over where you started. If I were given this coin to shoot at a show, I'd polish what I could and then smear oil on it to see through the remaining scratches better. If it was early in the show and the owner was staying for the duration, I'd encourage a show reholder.

Of course, making this holder perfect wasn't the point of this exercise, and you learned a bit about how to fix nasty holders, so a positive experience overall.

The Lexington - Concord Commem was made to honor the 150th Anniversary of the initial battles of the American Revolution! The famous Minuteman statue in Concord is on the obverse. This statue was sculpted by the same person known for the sitting Lincoln sculpture at the Lincoln Memorial. The reverse has the Old Belfry.

Pilgrim Commem - To try to force an increase in sales to collectors, they minted one in 1921 too, after the initial issue in 1920. To differentiate them, they added the date “1921” on the obverse of the second one, as the first one (1920) had no date on the obverse! Sales were so bad of the one made in 1921 that about 80,000 out of the roughly 100,000 made were returned unsold to Philadelphia and melted. As a result, the Commem dated 1921 is much tougher to find than the one from 1920.

The Pilgrim Commem has the famous Mayflower on the reverse, which landed at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts. There’s a glaring error on the reverse's Mayflower design: the ship is depicted carrying a "flying jib" (a triangular sail). This sail type had not yet been adopted in marine use in 1620, lol.

Steve

What a great idea for a thread!

So here's a story about a nice circulated coin in my collection. It's nothing lofty, but I love it all the same. When I first started going after a set of Mercury dimes, my goal was simply to fill an album with low grade coins. To that end, one of the first raw coins I picked up was a very worn 1921-D. This was at a stage in my collecting career when I knew very little about the finer points of coins, but I had read somewhere that as a key date, there was a chance it had been counterfeited. So I gave the coin a careful examination with a 10X loupe, and to my surprise I found a little fin of metal running between the rim and the base of Liberty's neck. What was this? Some nefarious artifact of casting?

Of course, though I didn't know it at the time, it was only a die crack. But my questions about that specific coin led me to the first stages of learning a lot more about Mercs and a lot more about coins in general.

So, when I decided to start assembling a graded set of dimes, I wanted to get another 21-D that had that same die crack. It took me a long time to find one I liked, but here it is.

What I really like about this dime (besides the die crack) is that It has the perfect medium gray color for circulated silver. The wear is remarkably even and pleasant, resulting in really attractive surfaces.

The only real drawback is a small green spot on the reverse, above the M in AMERICA. It doesn't appear to be PVC or anything active, and it isn't visible to the naked eye. I'm guessing maybe it's just a bit of residue from a spot of verdigris that was knocked off the surface.

I bought the Novus plastic polishing kit recommended above. So far, I have gone, not one, not two, but three rounds of polishing on this sucker. The results are.... mixed. But then again, the scratches were REALLY BAD so I blame the damage, and not the kit, which seems to be very, very good overall. I have polished up some far less damaged slabs to great success.

Anyhow, I am going to go one more round on this one and will post final results. At the very least, the coin is now mostly visible, so that's a huge plus.

PICS! The closeup intentionally has some glare so you can see the depth of scratches still remaining.

I could see a 62 as a possible best case scenario