Ebay 1834 $5 gold

mr1931S

Uncirculated?

Yousri

Uncertified, I won't even spend more than 3 seconds on that auction.

clackamas

Looks like a cast fake but then again I don't know the series.

Gemini

Looks like a cast coin and I wouldn't touch this one either.

dthigpen

I agree that it looks very cast and could very well be a fake.

robertpr

I agree it looks like a cast fake, and not a very good one at that.

mr1931S

Since it doesn't have excessive wear, weight should be very close to 129 grains, if genuine. If a casting, it will be far below this weight, since it will be undersize and the high likelhood that wrong Au-Ag-Cu mixture was used. That is, wrong if any attempt at all was made to get the alloy "right" prior to casting.

What is "far below?" I would say that if a lightly worn piece claimed to be a genuine 1834 $5 doesn't weigh at least 98.5% of 129 grains, or 127.06 grains, it should definitely be suspected as fake. All new mint-made $5 gold from 1834, starting with the Classic head type, and through the Indians to 1929, weighed 129 grains.

Anyone with additional information or insight regarding weight of genuine gold v. fake, feel free to contribute.

KurtHorn

If by some chance it is real then it is a very heavily cleaned coin. I would say Ef details net VF 30... Without out it being certified, and with such bad pics I wouldn't touch it with that starting price... I might have risked about $100 as a gamble that the coin was real against having to sell it as melt for poco bucks and a loss. But then I'm a little bit of a gambler...

vagal

RUN----don't walk

Outhaul

Certainly looks like a cast counterfeit to me.

ziggy29

Pretty unanimous. I'd stay away from raw gold on eBay regardless of how the coin looked. But this one looks very much like a cast fake.

BillJones

Sharpness grade is only Fine-12 or so. In addition to that at best it has been "sweated" (put in bag with other gold coins and shaken up so that small chunks of gold were removed from it. At worst it is a cast counterfeit.

Don't even bother with this. The starting bid to "loony tunes" regardless of what is wrong with this coin or fake. If the coin is real it's worth no more than $150 to $180 tops.

mr1931S

I misspoke a bit in my last post here on weight. Mint weight tolerance for $5 gold made from 1834 to 1929 is plus-minus .25 grains.That means before a "new" $5 gold piece could escape from the mint it must have weighed between 129.25 and 128.75 grains. Substitute "moderately worn" for "lightly worn" in my sentence.

Performed an interesting, at least to me, experiment yesterday. I weighed six very well-worn, presumably genuine 1914 Lincolns after retrieving them from my grandson's piggy bank to which I am a regular contributor, thinking they would all be detectibly underweight because of wear. Found that two of them actually weighed more than 48 grains (the mint standard weight for bronze small cents) by over 1 grain, one was right at 48 grains and the other three were under 48 grains by a grain or so.

Mint weight tolerance for new bronze small cents was plus-minus two grains, or eight times the tolerance for $1, $2-1/2, $3, and $5 gold, so my findings regarding the weight of my grandson's 1914 Lincolns are not all that remarkable.

No "D" was found on these either, on second inspection, so back into the piggy bank they go.