cointoast asked: what do you do w/ YOUR a-t coins?

dorkkarl

question posed by cointoast:

<< <i>WHAT steps have you taken to ensure that after your death these coins you just "played" around with to see if they would tone never make it into the general collecting public? >>

i think it is an excellent question.

i have experimented as "coin-doctor" thousands, literally thousands of times on coins, mostly silver. you must play coin-doctor to keep up w/ the coin-doctors. what i do is, when i'm done, i dip the coins big-time to blast-white, & they are off to silver-towne as bulk 90% silver.

before you thrown stones my way, rest assured, the vicitims are common stuff, 1960's roosevelts & quarters, etc, in lower grades. also, between experiments, i dip em & start over, so a single coin can be involved in multiple experiments, reducing the number of victims.

if you are experimenting, great! but as cointoast pointed out, take steps that frankenstein's children don't get out into the marketplace & end up in newbie's collections.

to my knowledge, none of my doctored coins has ever made it into another collection as a toned coin.

K S

nwcs

An interesting question. What about toning experiments where you're not applying chemicals but leaving them in situations where they might get toned naturally but intentionally?

For example, I've got some experiments with blast white coins being placed strategically in early 1900s paper to see what they do. I don't plan on submitting these if they ever tone, but they would- theoretically - be market acceptible.

dwood

nwcs...to me, your experiments are AT (sorry, that's my opinion). But again, it gets back to a definition. If you're knowing placing a substance in contact with the coin because it has been shown to cause a certain reaction, that's AT. The same if you scour eBay looking for particular holders because they always produce toned coins.

There's a reason those holders and that paer cause your coins to tone when they otherwise would not. There are chemicals present which are causing the toning. If you place them there "unobtrusively" by wrapping them in paper treated with the checmical, or placing them on a holder treated with the chemical, it isn't any different than if you apply them directly through some other process. You're still exposing the coins to something that causes a result not normally seen.

My opinion only, and I'm sure an unpopular one

nwcs

The way I see the type of experiment I'm doing is that it's a gray area in market acceptible. Coins toned by liquids are clearly AT to me. Coins toned over years unintentionally from whatever holder is market acceptible. But I'm trying to replicate the unintentional toning effect, which carries with it lots of unpredictibility. If these coins do tone nicely, they would likely be considered market acceptible (because no one would be able to tell how it got that way), but intentionally done. So the question becomes one of defining what is market acceptible.

Joshiah

Sure toned coins are beautiful and maybe you can intentionally tone a coin in the same way someone unintentionally toned it but if some one perfects intentional unintentional toning techniques and then say sells that technique to people wouldn't the market start to see many more toned coins thus dropping their value and just making them pretty. Besides wheres the fun in finding a toned coin you like if you can get custome toned coins just the way you like them, no challenge. to me it seems like all the toned coins I ever saw granted they were few were mostly unique like personality. Why would you want to force one coins personality one a bunch of other unsuspecting coins.I'm still very new at this but if custom order toning is the wave of the future my favorite color is blue and i think blue coins would be cool. Heck let's sell the toning techniques to the mint and have them cirrculate blue coins right from there. OK I guess the point is why bother trying to copy something that has happened shearly by chance. It takes all the fun out of it and a hobby is after all suppose to be fun. Please bear in mind this is only my opinion and I really don't know a lot about coins yet but please don't take all the fun out of it just as I get started!

Baley

this brings us to an interesting thought experiment. bear with me here!

say you open a long lost treasury vault and find an original bag of morgans. you open it
inside are 1000 coins, 50 of which have very beautiful and unquestionably original bag toning.
50 are ugly toned and look, frankly AT, and the remaining 900 are blast white.
you send the 100 toned coins to PCGS, the nice 50 get holdered, the ugly 50 get bagged (even though they are "real" they just don't look right)

Fine so far. Ok, so you now take the remaining bag of 900 home, where you have prepared a chamber that EXACTLY replicates the conditions in the treasury room, and you put the bag there, and you put the slabbed 50 coins in your bank safety deposit box, and you wait 70 years.

then you open the bag, and lo and behold! 100 more toned coins, 50 beautiful and 50 ugly.

so you send them to PCGS, and, again, the 50 nice ones get into holders, the ugly 50 dont.


now, my question is: what is adrian's assistant's name and phone number?


just kidding, couldn't resist. my real question is, what is the difference, if any, between the first 50 beautiful coins and the second 50 beautiful coins. also, what about the ugly coins? they (well the first 50 definitely) are "Original" yet the graders didn't like them.

say the first 50 nice coins and the second 50 nice coins are indistinguishable from each other: how can one be REAL and the other Artificial, just because the first was "accidental" and the second "intentional"??

Finally, the above why I won't pay 10x or 20x sheet for gorgeous toning, even though I am tempted: in 40 or 50 years (or 2 or 10) there may be a WHOLE lot more of them available.

now, offer them to me for 2x or 3x sheet, and I'm there

dwood

Good questions Baley.

As I've said before, there is no difference to me. ALL of them have been toned by some outside source, not because of the inert composition of the coins themselves. So whether the toning takes 100 minutes, or 100 years, the coin has been altered by exposure to something foreign.

Interesting scenario....

MadMonk

I send them to accugrade

UncleJoe

Buy the coin, NOT the toning.

Joe.

Baley

"buy the coin, not the toning"

is like saying buy the coin, not the luster, or buy the coin, not the strike.

buy the coin, not it's level of wear, or surface preservation, or eye appeal?

c'mon

lincolnSence

dwood - sorry, I don't understand your point. If the coin naturally tones or is assisted, what is the difference. The fact is (IMHO) the buyer must decide if he will pay for a coin that is toned slow like a fine wine or from a microwave oven. Either way, I don't see how you can distinguish in the example above. Personally, most of the toned monsters I see posted here make me sick. Some are nice. Its up to the buyer what he will pay based on the look of the coin. I think the market will eventually decide that regardless of how a coin is toned, certain colors or toning effects present will determine the price (ie: neon red on a morgan is pretty but not worth anything, but blue is worth more). JMO

Russ

Karl,

I'm leaving everything to my cat. She can do whatever she wants with them.

Russ, NCNE

UncleJoe

"buy the coin, not the toning"
is like saying buy the coin, not the luster, or buy the coin, not the strike.
buy the coin, not it's level of wear, or surface preservation, or eye appeal?
c'mon

Buy the coin, NOT the toning IMO is not like any of those other characteristics you listed.

I personally do not agree with the premiums paid for toning and I would never pay a premium based on toning alone.

Of course there are many that would disagree with me but that is up to each individual. When there are serious doubts that AT can de determined in all if not most cases, I find it hard to justify large premiums for "naturally" toned coins.

Joe.