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Posted 06/25/2023 12:28 pm
Tooled coins are very much frowned upon by most collectors. But even museums still buy and exhibit them. I see no bad scratches the the XF coin. It seems an excellent coin for the era. Weak center strike and slight wear in the reverse, normal. The VF coin seems corroded, is worn, much worse than the VF. I see no obvious tooling. But if there is any it would not fool anyone to think it a goof coin. The pricing difference is fair.
The extreme aversion to cleaned or scratched coins is seen here as an american thing. It has not existed in Europe. Plenty of commonly collected coins here are old. Like really old, thousands of years. There are no big batches of really old coins that spent their existence in bank vaults. That is a thing with 19th century coins and newer. Perhaps some 17th century. Go further back and the only perfect coins are those hidden inside building walls or recovered from shipwrecks. In Portugal the cutoff date for the hidden coins from buildings is 1755 because of the big earthquake here. A few years ago a stack of amazing 4000 reis moedas, those known as moidores in british colonies, from Bahia 1819 were found hidden in a building that survived the quake. It is the one big exception find I can remember.
Scratches, environmental damage, prior cleanings by collectors centuries ago, there are normal in very old coins. The standard for grading coins has been about metal wear, big metal damage like corrosion or solder, forgery or tooling, and lost details. Light scratches making a coin undesirable has not been a thing. The reaction to one such being marked details and not graded is, I have seen, quite bad. Once burned, ever shy.
There are positives to a grading service and I like those standards for modern coins. After the 19th century. Older coins, not such a good fit. The criteria would need changing.
The extreme aversion to cleaned or scratched coins is seen here as an american thing. It has not existed in Europe. Plenty of commonly collected coins here are old. Like really old, thousands of years. There are no big batches of really old coins that spent their existence in bank vaults. That is a thing with 19th century coins and newer. Perhaps some 17th century. Go further back and the only perfect coins are those hidden inside building walls or recovered from shipwrecks. In Portugal the cutoff date for the hidden coins from buildings is 1755 because of the big earthquake here. A few years ago a stack of amazing 4000 reis moedas, those known as moidores in british colonies, from Bahia 1819 were found hidden in a building that survived the quake. It is the one big exception find I can remember.
Scratches, environmental damage, prior cleanings by collectors centuries ago, there are normal in very old coins. The standard for grading coins has been about metal wear, big metal damage like corrosion or solder, forgery or tooling, and lost details. Light scratches making a coin undesirable has not been a thing. The reaction to one such being marked details and not graded is, I have seen, quite bad. Once burned, ever shy.
There are positives to a grading service and I like those standards for modern coins. After the 19th century. Older coins, not such a good fit. The criteria would need changing.
