1930 Standing Liberty Quarter

Looks VF-30 to me.

A great place to learn grading is PCGS Photograde online. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

http://www.pcgs.com/photograde/

VF-20

john1 ,,,the S is in wrong spot on this coin. it's supposed to be on the right side of the bottom star not left side.
I don't know ,but look at the top of the eagles right wing. looks like cast imperfections... maybe it's just me.

VF-20

Funny, I noticed the odd wing stuff, and then I read the posts. Nice catch on the mint mark T-BOP. Has to be a cast copy right? I was also thinking the obverse looked a bit soft.

JOHN, It's not a good fake because of the MM location. I really don't think it's 90% silver. As far as weight goes , have to ask OP.

John1 said, "So if this is a fake is it a good fake? Is it even silver? Weight?"

Truthfully, it's not a very convincing effort based on some of the more recent versions. It won't be silver.

Quick and easy tests that anyone can do include checking for a seam on the edge of the coin, checking the orientation (If you have the coin facing up, and flip it over, is the reverse "upside down" or in the same orientation? For most coin series, it should be upside down), the magnet test, weight test (not reliable) and the ring test vs. a known genuine example.

This one looks cast (mold poured.) The newest efforts are die-stamped on planchets like real coins, using crude electrical or hydraulic presses and with fresh-poured planchets being manually fed. No machine minting here -- dozens or hundreds of sweatshop employees pour the metal and then stamp the blanks, one coin at a time. The dies are often hand-engraved and vary from "almost looks okay" to "hey, I've never seen a Wheat cent reverse on an IHC."

The factories aren't just coin mills. They also forge currency, art, antiquities, jewelry, ingots/bars/rounds and even fake TPG slabs.

The most recent higher quality "silver" ones have rarely been seen struck in electrum (aka German silver) and occasionally plated with real silver, but they don't ring and have no Ag content beyond any plating. There's also all sorts of MUCH more common pot metal varieties in a wide selection of random alloys, some of which even use iron or steel and will stick to a magnet.

The damage these forgeries do if snuck in with legitimate small-enterprise smelting of coin silver is extensive, since they can contaminate the cheap Al2O3 crucibles easily, and I doubt the average home smelter is using insanely-high-dollar MgO crucibles. Larger operations often have very large and very noisy coil-wound electromagnets well ahead in the feed stage prior to mechanical "shaker" or scale sorting and XRF/EDS assay.

I agree, this one had me completely fooled. Not that I know much about Standing Liberty quarters anyway.

I admit now that I can see mushiness in the fine details, a casting line along the rim, and the wrong mint-mark of course. At a quick glance it appears genuine, and is certainly good enough to fool people new to the series.