1875 Seated Liberty Half Dollar...is It Real?

The coin is not a fake and It looks like a weak strike and why would anyone fake such a common coin. It had the 3rd highest mintage for the series.


That could be due to wear, the comparison is from and AG coin to a VF coin and depending on where you are measuring from. The thickness looks good to me and a micrometer would confirm.

Why would Henning fake a common nickel?

Oh the Chinese make em. I couldn't match one up with this one though and I looked at a few different ones.

I'll be getting new photos up tomorrow. Had a storm blow through and destroy a fence, so didn't have time today.

So far regarding this coin, here's where I am at:

(1) Passes mass test
(2) Dimensions seem correct
(3) Passes ping test
(4) I think it passes the Eddy Current slide test *

* I made a slide out of some rare earth magnets, and ran the following tests:
(a) Tested a SLQ, silver Washington, and clad Washington
(b) Tested a fake Morgan and a real Morgan
(c) Tested a 64 JFK and a clad JFK
(d) Finally, tested a known real 1853 half and this 1875 half

I did all these various tests to try and make sure I had some baseline success before worrying about the half dollar. After establishing that I could tell the difference between known silver and otherwise, I moved on to the SL. The 1875 responded identical to 1853, and the ping tests were identical on those two.

As mentioned before, I'm nowhere near an expert on counterfeits. If this is a fake, it seems like an exceptional one as it seems to pass every single test I can think of. I considered doing a specific gravity test, but I'm not sure how effective that would be if it turned out alloy proportioning was involved.

It does look off though. The only thing that makes sense to me is if it is a counterfeit done on a legit 90% silver half. At that point, it seems absurd to do though. If we were looking at high quality fake CC Morgans, then sure.

I have another SL half in better condition that I'll use to retake the rim comparison photos with. I don't have a ton of them, so most of the ones I own are AG-F. Except the three in my 7070. So I guess I'll bust out one of those for the sake of comparison!

EDIT:

I think regardless of whatever consensus I get here, I might just spend the $10 to have ANACS authenticate it. It might be quite educational to see what they have to say. If it is indeed a fake, but ANACS says it's real, it would be good to know what level of quality current counterfeits are at.

For what it's worth, I bought this online from someone who doesn't usually sell coins, but it was in with a bunch of other coins that are absolutely real, and were worth what I paid for the whole lot even if this one was fake. So it's not one of those fake Morgans listed at $65-200 nor was it one of those listings where it was being sold at or below melt. I'll also try and get a little more info from the seller as to where they got it from.

I'm sticking with my original inclination it's real. Ping test and eddy current are pretty conclusive it's 90% silver. Looks fine to me, just that the pics are a little out of focus.

UPDATE: I sent this and about a dozen other coins off to get graded. Just got the notification that the grading is finished and it is currently in shipping.

This coin came back as an 1875 Seated Liberty half dollar (VF35 - Altered Surfaces). I can't say that I'm at all surprised by that as the coin definitely has a weird look to it. The only guess I have that makes any sense is that something was covering a majority of the back and someone tooled it in some way to remove the junk on the surface of the coin. An abrasive cleaning and tooling of just the high points would cause an uneven wear pattern like this, so that's my guess.

I wish I could find out more details, but it sure looks like the obverse was untouched. I wonder if the coin was set in something so that some type of glue or bonding agent was applied to the back so the coin could be in some kind of mount. If it was for a long period of time, getting that off the reverse would indeed require chemicals or tooling, and pretty much just that top layer of the reverse of the coin would have to be removed at the high points. For what I paid, I'm happy with it!

The TPGrader has an advantage that we don't:
- the opportunity to closely examine it in hand.

Combine that sort of observation with many years of experience, and one can lend much weight to this sort of evidence.
A so called 'expert witness'.