Friday Metal Porn. Engelhard 1 ouncers. Rounds, bars. Early, late. What you got?

Weiss

A bit of a continuation of @asheland 's Engelhard threads. Working through the poured and extruded varieties of the 100 ounce bars and the 10 ounce bars, I had to move lots of 1-ounce pieces in the vault.

So nothing new in this group, but it's interesting all the same. What do you have in the area of 1 ounce Engelhard pieces?

I've got several handfuls of later 1 ounce Engelhard, but these are all "earlier" bars. I believe the first two on the upper left are from the late 1970s. Not crazy rare, allengelhard says they number about 12,500. But compare that to some of the later styles with mintages of hundreds of thousands and even millions and they are at least a little scarce. I've only ever seen the 2 in the wild, which is why I bought them.

Below them are slightly later horizontal bars dating from 1980. Then on the left are twelve more earlier vertical style bars, most of the centered E MC in the PT and PZ serial numbers dating from 1981.

And some Prospectors. I hadn't reimaged the bottom roll here for some time. When I first got them about 4 years ago, I reached out to allengelhard to ask if they were authentic because they are so ridiculously prooflike. And while Engelhard did produce proof prospectors for 1984, the combination of the front and back of these didn't correspond to the known proofs. Allengelhard were kind enough to authenticate them and told me that this is a roll of coveted very early die-state prospectors. I've certainly never seen anything like them before. FWIW: all prospectors are relatively scarce compared to the higher mintage bars. Mintages max out at "greater than 75,000" according to allengelhard. But again, compare that to mintages as high as 1.5M for the standard large E in globe vertical bars and you can appreciate the scarcity of an original roll of prospectors in their original Engelhard tubes.

And this is another from that interesting MTB statue of liberty series. This 1-ounce round is dated 1986. Allengelhard says these had a mintage of just 5,000 pieces. Not quite as scarce at @asheland 's Nippon round

DrBuster

I've got one prospector round that showed up during happy hour a few years ago that a guy sold to me. That's it for Engs for me.

ricko

@Weiss ... What is the story on that one tarnished prospector in that picture? Seems out of place with the rest of the mint fresh rounds. Cheers, RickO

asheland

I have a few, but probably more Engelhard 10’s than 1’s believe it or not...

asheland

asheland

I have a few others, but not photographed.

Weiss

@ricko said:
@Weiss ... What is the story on that one tarnished prospector in that picture? Seems out of place with the rest of the mint fresh rounds. Cheers, RickO

That top roll is incomplete: one I've put together over the years. Someone gave me that one and I haven't had the heart to dip it. If you count carefully, you'll see there are only 18 coins in that roll. I've got several other individual prospectors in Littleton(?) or some other retailer's plastic pouches that I kind of count in that roll even though I'd prefer to leave them in the individual pouches. They're 1982 pieces, too, which were the first year for Prospectors. Not a huge premium, I'm just a stickler for "original" packaging--even if it's not what Engelhard packed them in. Hard to believe these are nearly 40 years old now!

Weiss

But then again, idle hands are the devil's workshop

ricko

@Weiss... Well... I am an old prospector... and I also look a bit worn and traveled.... And I was minted loooonng before 1984. Cheers, RickO