I have in my possession an 1873 Trade Dollar, which I know very little about. A quick Google search reveals that these coins are heavily counterfeited, so I was hoping some of you all could help me determine the value (or lack thereof) of this coin. It does not stick to a magnet and seems to match (to my untrained eye, anyway) the Type 1 Obverse/Reverse pattern the mint used that year. Don't have access to a scale at the moment, but can take pictures or perform other tests as requested if needed to arrive at an answer.
Here's a picture without my microscope so it's apparent what it looks like without funky lighting: And the date as requested:
Would you mind explaining why so I can better differentiate between the two in the future? Also this is another coin from the same place. How does this one look?
Counterfeit! What you need to do is to take both your coin s to a dealer or coin show and ask to see a trade dollar or seated dollar in XF or higher condition. After he hands you his coin, take your coin out and compare the sharpness of the relief at the sides of the letters or numbers. Also not the texture of the smooth surface on the genuine pieces. If no dealer or show, go on the Heritage web site and pull up a magnified photo of the genuine.
I was pretty sure it was counterfeit until I did what you asked. If it is, it was a valiant effort: As for the surface, this coin in VG-10 (slabbed by PCGS) looks very similar: http://www.ebay.com/itm/1872-Liberty-Seated-Dollar-1-VG-10-PCGS-/222220191033 Not saying your wrong, but looking more closely has definitely piqued my interest.
You should be comparing a AU-Unc coin with yours because many low grade coins can "look" counterfeit because their relief details become MUSHY & ROUNDED just as seen on many fakes. Look at the eye detail in your Post#8. See the difference (in spite of the hit on the counterfeit)? PS The photos on Ebay are virtually worthless as they do not allow the magnification/detail found at Heritage or the PGCS Coin Facts.
The side-by-side photos were done using this MS-64 version of the same coin. And upon close inspection, I see all the same devices -- just really really worn:
If you cannot see the difference between the eye detail of the two coins above, I cannot help you. Good Luck.
Too bad @Mainebill has been MIA lately. He could give you another opinion since trade dollars are a specialty of his. I'm buzzing him anyway. But I'm trusting @Insider on this. If there is only one coin where a TPG should be mandatory, I would nominate the trade dollar.
On the PCGS web site is the sad story of a collector who submitted a complete set of $2.50 Indians for grading. You guessed it: Each and every one was fake. That ought to make a believer out of anyone.
I have to say I'm not particularly confident of either, for interrelated and in some cases anecdotal reasons. The denticles of the Trade Dollar are an immediate red flag; they should be far sharper than that even into Fine levels of wear and below. Further, in no case should they extend all the way to the rim, possibly excepting an off-center or misaligned-die strike in which case the opposite side of that face should be markedly away from the rim. I don't believe the surfaces should show anywhere near the "porosity" notable in your closeups, nor should there be such a disparity in size between the two stars shown in the detail. There's more but that's enough; the denticles alone are enough to drive me from thinking this one authentic. The 1842, having been shot at an oblique angle which distorts every single detail potentially beneficial to authentication, causes me to fall back on anecdotal thinking: It came from the same place as what I consider to be an obviously fake Trade Dollar, and well over half of the counterfeit Seated Dollars I've seen in over a decade of 30-hour weeks participating on fora like this one - likely 200 different examples at a minimum - have been 1842's or 1845's. Let's just say I'm not confident.... Look closely at the relief details inside the wings on the reverse. Or, I should say, the fatal lack thereof.
Thanks for the input. Sorry about the pictures; I will include some better ones at the end of the post so you can confirm. I was able to weigh the coins; the trade dollar is indeed fake and weighs 5 grams light. The 1842 is within a couple tenths of a gram. Appreciate the help and input everyone; I'm just trying to thoroughly cover my bases and make sure I understand why you are coming to the conclusions you're coming to so I can make those same determinations in the future.
The only thing necessary to authenticate a coin is to know what the genuine specimen should look like. Then, if something looks out of the ordinary, you may not know for sure that it is bad; but you'll know it is different and be cautious. The surfaces of your two coins LOOK NOTHING like a genuine coin. If you wish to learn authentication you can start by using magnification to look very closely at every "vintage" coin you can. Unfortunately, this is more difficult today than when I started decades ago using a stereo microscope to do this. That's because many of the state-of-the-art new counterfeits are even passed as genuine by the TPGS until they are detected. Not to worry, I know that at least one TPGS is looking and working on methods way out of the box on things you cannot imagine in order to detect deceptive new fakes in the future. I was in a counterfeit detection class in the 1980's when our instructor told us that "the days of using a hand lens for authentication are over!" I can tell you that the days of using a microscope for authentication will be over in my lifetime and I probably have less than ten years to go. Oh, that should make a few folks here happy!
Excellent images for the question you ask of us. My best response to them is, "pretty much nothing looks right." Too much "graininess," "porosity," whatever term you wish to apply, for me to feel this was struck under the 100+ tons of pressure it took to create one at the Mint. Keep in mind, under the sort of pressure which makes metal flow like liquid, from an engineering standpoint it's greatly advisable to make that metal movement as smooth as possible. Therefore, flat surfaces (the fields) of a coin die were polished to make them as smooth as possible, features raised on the final coin (devices) tended to follow smooth transitions with little "sharp" definition, and surfaces which could be described as "rough" were avoided in the majority of cases. Even on coin designs like Seated issues, where there is rock represented, a close look at high-resolution images of Mint State examples will - to the discerning eye - show the engineering effort put forth to enable fast, successful strikes of thousands of examples while minimizing die wear. Very, very few coins (the Buffalo Nickel being an exception, and they're quite difficult not only to grade but to evaluate in terms of strike quality or die wear because the fields are so rough) were not greatly compromised from a design standpoint towards ease of production. That's Coin Design 101 - make it economically strikable, then find a pleasing design which allows that end. I would be deceptive by failing to mention it's known that both circulation wear and die wear from long use can lessen these effects. All the same, the fields in particular will rarely lose much of their smoothness over the course of a die's life, and it's intuitive that much handling by many fingers will_not_result in anything but a "smoother" coin. Circulation wear will smooth, not roughen, the "positive" (raised above field level" devices of a coin, and die wear (again, intuitively, considering how many times metal has flown through them under tremendous pressure) tends to smooth and lessen detail rather than roughen it. An issue-specific point for your Seated Dollar is found in the comparison of apparent wear on the hair and cap/pole. The former are - to the successful student of the issue - worn down to (at best) low EF appearance, while the latter show barely any evidence of "circulation" at all. And the first thing that circulation would have done is worn the "roughness" off of the talons. Now, one argument against all this is the potential for the coin to have been buried in soil of unknown acidity, then dug up and cleaned. Such an experience can definitely result in the roughened look of the devices on this coin. But it would have done equal damage to the fields, as well, and although not as smooth as I'd expect from a struck coin the fields of this one most definitely don't show the effect of being ground-engaged. My previous remarks regarding the lower (on the z-axis from the coin's surface) details within the eagle's feathers stand reinforced by your images. I expect more detail there. The differences are subtle; just remember that "blank space" in a device - where the level of the device reached the same plane as the fields - is the enemy of pleasing design (because they'd start getting larger the moment the die started to wear, not to mention from a die engineering standpoint field-level spots in devices are an interruption to smooth metal flow), so one would expect even the "blankest" of spaces to show some little z-axis curvature. T'ain't real.
