Some "cap & Rays" 8 Reales Questions

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Author	Replies: 3 / Views: 1,407
Lucky Cuss Pillar of the Community United States 4883 Posts	Posted 04/07/2014 6:30 pm 1) To judge from current published guides, why are so many mintage quantities prior to about 1880 evidently unknown? Surely a yearly tally at each mint would've been compiled, reported, and recorded? How is it that such basic information seems to be no longer available? 2) Why are so, so many examples cleaned, and usually badly, and I mean "Brillo pad" or even "buffing wheel" badly? It just seems discouragingly endemic with these. 3) Why in the period 1969 through 1873, when the "Balanza" Un Peso was being struck, was there continuing and concurrent production of the supposedly superceded 8 Reales design? I've never heard a satisfactory explanation for this. In 1870-71, for example, the Culiacan, Durango, Guadalajara, Guanajuato, San Luis Potosi, and Zacatecas mints supposedly all made both types. Was the alternate output intended for export (my understanding being that the Chinese resisted accepting the new, smaller diameter peso denominated coin)? I apologize in advance if there is source material that answers any or all of the above, but I haven't seen or been able to locate it up to now. Colligo ergo sum Report this Post to the Staff

jfransch Pillar of the Community United States 1801 Posts	Posted 04/07/2014 10:53 pm Lucky Cuss 1870 was a transition year where several of the mints started the year minting Resplandores and then shifted production to balance scale pesos mid year (or even sooner). Many of the 1870 dated Cap and Ray coins are extreme rarities due to very small partial year mintages and the huge percentage that were exported to the Asian trade. A few of the mints struck resplandores in 1871 and 1872 but I am not sure those few mints also struck the peso coins as well. I am at work and without access to my library, I can check when I get home. The best book so far on the Cap and Ray coins is the Dunigan/Parker reference book called "Resplandores" which is still available from Mike Dunigan and many other coin stores that specialize in Mexican Coinage. Report this Post to the Staff
dosmundos Valued Member Germany 194 Posts	Posted 04/08/2014 04:50 am Many mints were operated under private lease. My first guess would be that most documents, including production figures, stayed with the company and were not sent to government / state archives. Actually, I would say that even on a worldwide basis, most coins are cleaned, if you take a closer look at them. Some more expertly than others. But in public sales and dealers' lists, usually only the better (i.e., not badly cleaned) ones show up. So it's not just the 8 Reales. However, comparatively less 8 reales survived in uncirculated condition than, for example, Morgan dollars. Truly mint state examples with few bagmarks (which end up in these plastic coffins as MS64 or better) are really, really scarce and even unattainable for many DAMs. Report this Post to the Staff
Lucky Cuss Pillar of the Community United States 4883 Posts	Posted 04/08/2014 10:29 am I find it highly implausible that the branch mints, which admittedly the Mexican government for a long time supervised too loosely, still wouldn't have been required at the very least to report how many coins they had struck during a calendar year. Now, whether these figures were archived, and if so, whether anybody has ever researched them, may be another question altogether. What's interesting is that in the guides I've looked at, for some years in the 1870's, a stray branch mint quantity (deemed to be possibly partial) is given, and such are documented for all the mints in the years 1877-78, and also for some years in the early to mid 1880's. Starting in 1886, the quantities appear to be well verified for all the mints. But prior to 1873, there's nothing, not even for the mother mint in Mexico City. Colligo ergo sum Report this Post to the Staff
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Some "Cap & Rays" 8 Reales Questions