Starting A Collection Of World Silver Coinage

One of the approaches I use
is look a a dealers bulk stock of one particular type (for example Walker half dollars), looking for best value for money:
If the opportunity presents itself, I will only cherry pick a single best coin out of perhaps 30 or more coins in the bulk lot. Not greedy, I will leave the next best for another collector.

Another approach:
I have found that many more real bargains are available, when you open your options to cherry pick across the whole of numismatics, ancient to modern.

I never set my heart on looking for particular coins.
I never try to build sets of coins, but I will always jump on a key coin IF it also happens to be a cherry pick that has been missed by others. That does happen sometimes, with World coins.

I have found that buying efficiency is typically around 15-20% of catalog value, or around 30-40% of current market value.

Interesting.
50 Cents per gram ASW is about 3.75% above the current spot price of 48.2 Cents per gram.

Well done!

Nice buy on the 20c Chinese coin, pretty collectable and heavily faked.

Lots of goodies today:

1952 Mexico 5 pesos (purity: 0.72, ASW: 20 g). This one is about as big as a one ounce silver round, or a US silver dollar:




1920 United Kingdom 1 florin (purity: 0.5, ASW: 5.65 g):




1931 Iraq 50 fils (purity: 0.5, ASW: 4.5 g):




I picked these three up (about 30 grams of total silver content) for under $15. Seems like ebay auctions are the way to go for acquiring cheap world silver coins.

The British 'Two Bob' (=Florin) is an interesting coin in terms of it's alloy.

50% fine with the other 50% a standard copper nickel alloy.
The alloy turned out to be a failure, because the coins developed an ugly yellowish toning.

In 1922, the alloy was changed to billon (an alloy of 50% silver, 50% copper.) The Royal Mint still wasn't completely happy, because of wear characteristics, and the fact that the coins tended to darken more than was completely desirable.

So, the alloy was changed again in 1928, to quaternary metal (50% silver, 40% copper,5% nickel 5% zinc).
The blanks were blanched in acid then rinsed, before converting into planchets, thence passed to the coining presses.
The acid had the effect of enriching the silver in the surface layer to around 90%, which made them look like 90% silver coins.

This also created a problem, because as the coins wore down in circulation, the poorer alloy showed through the wear points. This problem was tolerated by The Royal Mint, and quaternary metal continued to be used until 1945. Australian silver coinage continued to be made from quaternary metal until 1964.

Well done.

I have a handful of world silver coins which I might show in this thread.