Another Ridiculous Auction

Kurt I would agree with your grade of fine. That gives it a catalogue value of $8. Far cry from US$110, but good luck to him if he gets it. Have you seen this link for grading pre decimals? It is also great for the mintmarks.

http://coingrading.vpcoins.com/

Vg+ at best obv, bottom band is nowhere near complete, no trace of diamond, and bottom pearl of the 5th/ 6th pearls is joined to band. Also has been cleaned by the looks. So straight away down to aVG for me.
AU+ R/B TONE!, is laughable at best, sheer deception and misrepresentation more like it.

just might have to offer them 1c for that coin.

very funny, I bought a coin off him when I first started out (1918 6p) and you guessed it CHOICE UNCIRCULATED I couldnt believe my luck getting such a valuble coin for $80 the pic was fuzzy though it looked like a quality coin and he had good feedback so I dove in, anyway 2 weeks went by and a package arrived from the man in question, it felt very heavy for a coin, when I opened it to find 2 old light bulbs, I contacted him to let him know and he was very sorry and asked me to resend the package to the rightfull owner which I did, 2 weeks later the coin arrived, written on 2/2 choice uncirculated 6 storng beads, it was aVF at best I later sold it for $30, couldnt be bothered getting a refund, I felt sorry for the bloke so I left positive feedback. cheers

G'day IC3, & welcome.
How are the Wahines down your way ?
... or are you too young to remember a song about your town by Captain Matchbox ?


quote: "... are their grades different ?"
- yes. Grading is the pretence that an essentially subjective exercise can be given a veneer of objectivity. The hobby, or perhaps industry, is now attended by TPG [third party graders] & FPG [you guessed it: fourth party graders]. Meanwhile, nearly every seller on ebay prefaces his grade with words to the effect "I'm not a grader, but ...".

You will note that grades bottom out at "about good", which translates to "only just recognizable as a coin". At the top, there are half-a-dozen sub-grades within "uncirculated".

Anyway, if you scroll back to the top of this screen; look on the left side; among the many interesting & valuable links there, you will see 8th from the top "Glossary". Go there, and look up "AG", "fine", "VF", "unc", "AU", and anything else you can think of. The Glossary is, for the most part, Seppo-centric, but you will be better informed.

Renniks latest edition devotes half of one page to grading.
I have a Gadoury, the standard catalogue of French coins, which has five pages on grading, including numerous pics to illustrate the text.
I have seen Seppo books that go to even greater lengths to explain their criteria.
I blame the accountants for this state of affairs.
Peter in Darwin

way to young (i think)

Ya know if I was the mint and produced a AU+++ coin that looked like that, I would change professions Sorry mate

intentcity3: Yes the USA uses a very different grading system from that used in Australia, although I am seeing the American system make inroads into Australia. The US (Sheldon) system grades coins on a scale from 1 to 70 although in practice fewer than half of those numbers are actually used. The numbers are invariably preceded by a prefix such as the familiar VF and EF. MS is a Sheldon prefix which means "mint state" so the top end you have MS60 to MS70, below that is AU50-AU59, EF40-EF49 and so on. The grades are very sparse at the lower end and very dense at the top end.

Generally speaking it doesn't matter so long as you realise that the systems are radically different and you do not mistake a Sheldon EF for an Australian EF. The Sheldon system introduced an entire grade between UNC (MS) and EF so the Sheldon AU corresponds roughly to EF and that pushes EF down to the top end of VF and so on all the way down the scale. Furthermore, MS doesn't really correspond to UNC. The lowest MS (MS60) is really aUNC. As things go up from there they get complicated. UNC, CHU and GEM are all covered within the MS range.

The popular catalogues in Australia (McDonalds, Renniks) also have AU as a separate grade but dealers probably don't use those guides anyway.

An approximate correspondence between Sheldon and Australian would be something like this:

FDC MS70
GEM MS67
CHU MS64
UNC MS62
aUNC MS60
gEF AU58
EF AU55
aEF AU53
gVF EF45
VF EF50
aVF VF45

I just compiled that table as a quick exercise by looking at the PCGS "Official Guide to Coin Grading and Counterfeit Detection" and it represents my judgement as to how the grades correspond. If I were to spend more time then I might make a slightly different table so feel free to disagree.