A Hint About Professional Coin Grading

I take it you are standing in for Dave in his absence.I am a slow typer, can I abbreviate your name with something other than the obvious? Anything to speed me up would be helpful. I was under the impression that safe cleaning was available. I also think airtight encapsulation is sufficient in most cases (other than zinc cents). Please correct me if I am wrong. I will definitely look into ANACS, thank you.

Yes I know not to clean them. I had thought the services had a safe way to do it and offered it. I'm not sure where I got that from, but it's gone now. I would definitely want conservation on any zinc with the slightest scratch. They almost fit the uncollectable category without it.

They do, and they handle it well. But the zinc? I rail against Zlincolns for a reason. They're numismatic planned obsolescence, coins minted from sacrificial anodes. The only help is lacquer or urethane. Anyone who collects Zlincolns is tempting fate. You've seen plating bubbles - they didn't come from the Mint with those bubbles, and obviously the cladding didn't have to be scratched for them to appear....

Cleaning/conservation is a coin-by-coin decision. The TPG's - PCGS and NGC; ANACS just introduced their service and I have no clue about their effectiveness so I'm not including them in this - can often take your coin and turn it into something that doesn't need a Details slab (nice gig if you can get it, eh?).

Only those two if you're going to resell. I recommend only Morgans for ANACS, and even then only if you're selling to Morgan enthusiasts or collecting them by variety. Otherwise ANACS is a third-world grader in the marketplace.

Not really. Heck, he and I spend as much time texting on the phone as we do posting here. We'd have worked it out offline if we disagreed.

ANACS is the least expensive and the easiest for you to use as they don't require a membership. They're not bad graders, either, and the best in the business with Morgans. They're the only TPG which attributes every single Morgan variety and their attributions can be taken to the bank.

Their stuff just sells at a discount in the auction marketplace. If that's unimportant to you, ANACS is your choice. And I'm not denigrating their conservation service, I just haven't seen enough of their work to have the right to an opinion.

Surely, if a grader in PCGS can grade a coin in less than ten seconds, I should be able to grade per coin in five minutes reasonably accurately and make detailed comments to boot.

You just have to learn to grade for yourself. With experience, that is reasonably easy to do, and get it right almost all of the time.

Save myself the $16 per coin fee and shipping fees, and not have to worry about risking your coins to the postal or shipping system.

In that case, we may be calling PCGS liars here. I'm not really prepared to do that, so we have to figure out a way for Jeff to handle 208,000 coins a year.

And an equal number of weeks in the shipping dept?

I assume he has acted in a supervisory capacity and the numbers factor in his greater influence as a supervisor.