A New Counterfeit 8R.

Last week I received a pair of counterfeits from a dealer friend who sells to me on a regular basis. Both turned out to be cast copies one was a modern underweight copy but the other was older and overweight at 28.3 grams. When I bought it, I wondered if it could be a silver counterfeit the kind made for the China trade or possibly a late Class 1 coin (Contemporary Circulating Counterfeit).

In person it looked considerably different. It has a mixture of both old and new features that at the time had me just a bit unsure how it should be classified. It could be a late Class one after 1830 but it also could be an early numismatic forgery.

The coin looks like this:






So today on ebay.ca I noticed the same coin is posted as an original.

Here is that coin:







So having seen that second IDENTICAL example - I am reclassifying the coin as a Numismatic forgery. Perhaps it was made to fool collectors of genuine coins or possibly it was made to fool collectors of counterfeits.

One new feature my newest counterfeit brings to the table is a 4 segment edge punch. The edge die was created by repeatedly punching the die stock with a 4 section punch - two circles and two rectangles. I have seen individual, two section and of course three section, but this is (as I recall) my first 4 segment punch.

Just tried to take a picture of the edge when my camera battery died. So I will have to post that later.