Help Grading A 1918 S Walking Liberty Half

Another EF40 here.

EF-45 (appears to be a little weakly struck)

Nice coin. This is not my series so take my opinion with a grain of salt. I would say 40 due to lack of luster.

As I understand it the 18-S is an elusive strike. It also happens to be the date of the only walker I currently own.

Thanks. I bought it as a AU53 grade and am pretty comfortable with that. In hand it is a great looking s mint. It will be fun to see how PCGS grades the week strike and early Walker. Again it was nice to see no details grade. I usually pull at least one of those.

Would love to see what it's grade is.

There is quite a range between the grades of the two examples that in my opinion may only vary slightly by strike quality. It seems that having early Walkers graded is like a box of chocolates. I'm interested to see what PCGS has to say about yours.

Here's my 1917-S OMM graded XF-45 by PCGS. This coin was previously graded AU-50 by SEGS. It has quite a bit of remaining luster and pretty strong feather detail which makes me think SEGS was closer to the mark. I agree that grading the early Walkers seems tricky and pretty subjective.

I spent a few hours looking at WLH's in the EF40-AU55 range for sale on ebay and many other sites. I guess it comes down to the grader and their decision whether a coin is worn or struck poorly. When it comes to the early Walkers that is very subjective. I saw coins with breast feathers worn flat get AU53 grades and coins with midbreast feathers get EF45. I'm sending 12 WLH's in today with 8 Peace dollars. It should be interesting in a month when I get them back. Then I will send another batch of WLH's and SLQ's.