Guess the grade - Nice New Frankie - Grade revealed!

FC57Coins

Take a shot at this one -

LucyBop

that one has ms66 written all over it..... very nice, I can't tell about the bell lines, they seem to break to the left of the bell....

This coin is yummy!!!!!!

paigowjohnny

Lucy smooched me...so I'm gonna leave it alone....

LucyBop

Heres my answer, this GEM came from R&I coins.... My brilliant 63p after a quick photo...

MadMonk

I hate grading scans, but I'll go out on a limb and say 66fbl, so, what are you going to do with your ugly old 65fbl?

dorkkarl

ms-67

K S

VonZipper

I guess ms66fbl like the rest.

DCAMFranklin

MS-65FBL Nice clean coin Frank.

ccr

I don`t know my Frankie`s that well. I`ll go with to flow and say MS65FBL. Really nice Frank, Frank. I like, I like.

ksteelheader

MS65 and I think FBL,,,,,,,,,,,,,Ken

FC57Coins

OK - a few lessons to be learned.

1. Never grade from a picture. Although the coin is definitely a premium quality Franklin, there are minute dings on the face of the coin that would keep it in the grade it's in, as opposed to one of the loftier grades in my opinion. However, it IS a very nice coin, very smooth fields, and this is one of the reasons that I prefer PCGS Frankies over NGC Frankies. Although I've crossed a number of them, for the most part the PCGS graded coins just stand very well on their own. Of course, buy the coin, not the slab!

2. Lucy was right, the bell lines deteriorate on the left hand side of the bell. In order to be a bonafide FBL coin, the bell lines HAVE to go all the way through and uninterrupted. This is a very typical 1960's type strike, where the metal did not completely flow to the deepest recesses of the bell line detail, hence, you have a somewhat mushy bell line on the left hand side of the bell.

3. If anyone picked up on the seller's hope that this was an FBL coin, that's the third lesson. Very rarely will one of the big boys in grading be wrong about whether a coin should be FBL or not. An FBL coin is 99.99% of the time going to have full, uninterrupted, bell lines. Either it is, or it isn't. When you see a dealer say - well - they really missed the boat, this is an FBL for sure, be weary - you're probably looking at something that is marginal at best. (Bytheway, this coin came from one of the better dealers on the net and I've bought tons of coins from them. So for me to say that maybe they were thinking wishfully is by no means that they're not a good dealer. They are, and I will continue to buy from them - you just have to know what you're getting - as you will see from the final lesson learned)

4. And finally, one of the nice things about the Franklin series is that you can get awesome coins very reasonably. This coin, beautiful as it is - is rather common, over 1300 in this grade in the census. As such, it came quite cheap - $31! Moral of the story, although some of us do go over the deep end getting those MS65FBL's and up, you can also get some pretty nifty Frankies just because they look nice!

Enjoy!

Frank

Oh yeah - here it is:

LucyBop

Be Bop A Lula!!!!