If you don't visit the darkside forum often--take note
Weiss
Posts: 9,941 ✭✭✭✭✭
I've had a hankering for more exotic pieces of junk silver lately. My dealer routinely ships off foreign junk to be melted. Saw he had a shipment ready recently, and asked if I could take a peek--save him shipping and make him a little more than the smelter would give him. He said sure!
This was a huge box of several thousand pieces. I just did a quick search in the ".900" silver bag and picked out these two pieces for melt. The German piece is a typical 19th century "crown"--every country had the equivalent to our silver dollar at the time. The smaller (Manchurian/Chinese) piece intrigued me because it just looked exotic. At 4 grams, less than $5 melt, I thought it was neat.
Saw an episode of Storage Wars a few weeks back where a coin dealer used a simple magnet to determine if suspect coins were fake. Tried it on the Manchurian piece tonight and it stuck like glue.
Now I KNOW better--I'd never had bought real dollars worth of Chinese coins or frankly ANY coins that I wasn't 100% familiar with. This was just a cheap impulse buy.
And a magnet doesn't always work. There are some counterfeit alloys that aren't magnetic. I've got a fake 1 oz round here on my desk that doesn't stick but there is no question it's a fake.
Anyway, you might carry a magnet with you if you dabble in darkside stuff from time to time. It's cheap insurance
This was a huge box of several thousand pieces. I just did a quick search in the ".900" silver bag and picked out these two pieces for melt. The German piece is a typical 19th century "crown"--every country had the equivalent to our silver dollar at the time. The smaller (Manchurian/Chinese) piece intrigued me because it just looked exotic. At 4 grams, less than $5 melt, I thought it was neat.
Saw an episode of Storage Wars a few weeks back where a coin dealer used a simple magnet to determine if suspect coins were fake. Tried it on the Manchurian piece tonight and it stuck like glue.
Now I KNOW better--I'd never had bought real dollars worth of Chinese coins or frankly ANY coins that I wasn't 100% familiar with. This was just a cheap impulse buy.
And a magnet doesn't always work. There are some counterfeit alloys that aren't magnetic. I've got a fake 1 oz round here on my desk that doesn't stick but there is no question it's a fake.
Anyway, you might carry a magnet with you if you dabble in darkside stuff from time to time. It's cheap insurance
We are like children who look at print and see a serpent in the last letter but one, and a sword in the last.
--Severian the Lame
--Severian the Lame
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