Slabbed Ikes

chequer: the slabs are sold for individuals to place their own coins in for protection. smokeriderdon's is the popular Coin World slab (that's their logo in the plastic), 0.99 each, 3/2.97 in a huge variety of sizes. Your Beckett logo is another brand. Lighthouse EVERSLAB and new QUICKSLAB, etc. They differ from the high end TPG because the slabs are not sonically sealed against tampering.

Several reputable services use the CW slabs as their holder and then add value (such as variety attribution, Variety Slabbing Service - http://varslab.com/ comes to mind). With these services it's not about the slab, it's about the attribution they provide.


Then you have the dark side of the force, what's commonly called a self (or less nicely basement) slabber. Somebody who takes these plastic shells, puts in it a label that looks important and assigns a grade that may or may not be grounded in reality. Give it a long impressive serial number - that implies a lot of business. And a bar code. Don't forget a bar code - even printed in smeary ink jet in a bad font, that must mean it's authentic...

plastic is plastic... once you make a mold (or contract to have somebody make one for you) you can push them out by the 100000s.

Now it could be the same mold as CW, but with a small logo detail replaced. The base mold would have a small hole and the logo would be inserted into it almost like a thumbtack: that's 'Customized'. The big expense would be the base mold. But you would need to compare them almost at the microscopic level to be sure that the injection points and gates are exactly the same, vs. two separate but similar molds [after all in large part the form is dictated by the function and all coin slabs are going to be superficially the same]

Gotcha about the slabs (knew that), just trying to figure out the Beckett connection and see if anyone knew why they seem to have "authenticated" coins. Thanks