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Basic Question about Coin Wear

SDSportsFanSDSportsFan Posts: 5,086 ✭✭✭✭✭

I have a, perhaps strange, but basic question.

When a coin wears, what happens to it?

What I mean is, when a coin goes from MS, to say, VG, is the metal actually removed from the coin, or is it simply redistributed on the coin?

If the metal is removed on a Morgan Dollar for instance, how much less silver is there on a VG coin, as compared to an MS one?

Steve

Comments

  • TomBTomB Posts: 20,697 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Metal is lost, but it is very little. One might want to place a pile of VG Morgan dollars on a scale and weigh it vs. a similar pile of MS Morgans to get a real feel for absolute metal weight lost or percentage metal weight lost. This has probably been done, and maybe even by members of this forum, but I don't have the data at-hand.

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  • BryceMBryceM Posts: 11,721 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited March 15, 2023 4:25PM

    Metal is actually lost, mostly. Maybe a bit of it moves around, especially on gold and other soft alloys.

    When minted, pre-1964 dimes, quarters, and half dollars contained 0.723 oz of silver per dollar of face value. For dollars, it's 0.773.

    When buying or selling junk silver, 0.715 is a commonly used number to account for lost metal from wear. Or, for large deals, it's not so uncommon to just weigh the lot and multiply by 0.900 to get the quantity of bullion silver.

    "Back in the day", people would sometime "sweat" gold coins by dissolving a bit of the surface in acid and then recovering the metal or putting them in a bag, tossing them around a bit, and collecting the "free" gold dust that would result. Filing the rims could also be done. The coins would still trade at face value, and the recovered metal from the debased coins became "free money."

  • airplanenutairplanenut Posts: 21,881 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited March 15, 2023 4:36PM

    @TomB said:
    Metal is lost, but it is very little. One might want to place a pile of VG Morgan dollars on a scale and weigh it vs. a similar pile of MS Morgans to get a real feel for absolute metal weight lost or percentage metal weight lost. This has probably been done, and maybe even by members of this forum, but I don't have the data at-hand.

    This would be interesting because depending on weight tolerances and how many coins are used (thus setting the likelihood of an even distribution of starting weights when the coins were struck) I wonder if you could have lighter uncirculated coins than circulated ones. I'm guessing not if using VG coins, but if you weigh just a few, the amount of weight lost could appear to be less than expected.

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  • pursuitoflibertypursuitofliberty Posts: 6,558 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Somewhere I seem to remember between 1 and 1.5% metal loss as the wear progresses from Unc to Fine, which generally fits with the .715 junk silver number, which again, as I remember, was generally used for F/VF or better coins


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  • Steven59Steven59 Posts: 8,262 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Coin Ware/wear ........works for me.......

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  • ShurkeShurke Posts: 120 ✭✭✭

    A quick search turned up some old threads (dated 2010 and 2014) in other coin forums. People who weighed various silver denominations in all grades seemed agree that silver loss from MS to XF was relatively negligible. But silver loss by weight from MS to AG ranged from 3-7%.

  • rickoricko Posts: 98,724 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Definitely weight loss with wear. Some metal movement on gold, less on silver. To do an accurate weight comparison, one would need to closely compare the coins in each lot, or variances would be significant when attributing to grade wear. Cheers, RickO

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