A quick lesson in Artificially Toned Buffalos...

airplanenut

If you have a toned buffalo, hold it behind a light and tilt the coin. If it produces a hazy halo at any time, the coin is AT. This trick was taught to me by Bob Campbell, the toning expert (and a really great guy in general).

To illustrate, here are some buffalos out of soon-closing eBay auctions that are in SEGS slabs...





Bad pictures? Yes, but you should get the idea...

Jeremy

Hadleydog

Very cool piece of knowledge to carry around in the old hip pocket.

airplanenut

ttt for the gang

mr1931S

great information!

Russ

Nice halo on this one:





Russ, NCNE

airplanenut

Russ, we didn't tilt it in the light to see if it's a hazy halo

jom

Unfortunately, your pictures don't do much good Jeremy. I'm still not quite certain what you mean by "halo". If it's a concentric circle of color then I'm not sure I agree with Mr. Campbell but then again I'm not sure what you are referring to either.

The pictures you show are too "washed out" to make any kind of judgement on the color of the coin.

jom

airplanenut

Jom,

Take an AT buffalo and tilt it behind the light--instead of seeing the colors of the toning, you'll see rings of haze. Pretend it looks like the nickel shown by Russ, just without the color--figure it's milky.

I realize the pictures I took from the auction suck--the effect is similar... you'll see the rings with a slightly different color that are hazy (the first picture is better).

dorkkarl

i agree. but it's hardly a litmus test.

K S