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Toned Coins

Coin FinderCoin Finder Posts: 7,234 ✭✭✭✭✭
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How long does it take a great grader, a pro, to determine if the color he/she is looking at on a toned coin is original or artificial?

What is the number one tell tale sign?

Thanks

Tbig

Comments

  • homerunhallhomerunhall Posts: 2,496 ✭✭✭
    Less than 10 seconds. Graders look at the way the toning lays on a coin...and the color shades. Remember that most PCGS graders have graded millions of coins at PCGS and most were dealers before that.

    Personally, I look at the colors and if it's a color I didn't see 20 years ago thered flags go up.

    The other day I was thinking about how many coins I've looked at. I think I've examined between 300,000 and 400,000 auction lots. I think I've examined more than 2 million Morgan dollars...here's a story...in the late 1970s Larry Goldberg had a bag deal of dollars...12 bags of S-Mints and some later O-Mints, including a bag of 98-Os. He let me go thru all 20,000 coins and pick the best ones and buy them. It took me a day and a half. I picked the best 8,000 coins...I think I paid $9 or $10 a coin to pick. This group of coins was so nice that a week later Bob Hughes called me and said he had bought the nicest 12 bags of dollars he had ever seen...they were the ones I had left behind!!!!! image

    Back to quantities...I think I've examined over 10,000,000 coins.

    PCGS graders have similar experience. Ron Howard was at Paramount in 1976 and was one of the first dealers to see the Redfield dollar hoard!!!! Gordon Wrubel used to go to Europe to buy U.S. gold coins and he's looked at deals that had tons of Saints and other gold.

    We all have seen so many coins that we can grade fast and make determinations like AT very quickly. After your first million coins, it just starts to become a little easier.

    David
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