8 Reales: Any Ideas On This Coin?

Albert The coin is a recently made centrifugal casting. Unless it contains some silver, which is unlikely, it is worth about $1.

Thank you for the reply, can you please tell me how quickly you pinned it down by photo alone and no edge photos?
I wish I could do that. But in this case maybe the smoking gun was the date and I made an obvious blunder.
So many of these old coins look nice to me based on photos alone. I can post better pictures of each side individually:

Almost every feature of this coin is off by some degree. Size and shapes of fonts caught my eye right away. You should always try to find a legitimate example to compare to. The problem with this coin is that no legitimate example exists. Pillar dollars from the Santiago mint are incredibly rare and none are known for 1752.

One other point. The clue I used can be used on all screw press coins and does not require any knowledge of the coin itself.

The other methods cited above - checking a reference listing of dates actually made in Santiago, Chile and photographs of genuine coins are both valid techniques. In this case, I did not need them because serious error in manufacturing technique.

I'm surprised to see one for sale on ebay for $300, but maybe I shouldn't be. I was hoping to get input based on just looking at the devices and fields of the coin itself. But I blundered and forgot that I was posting a known and documented fake. But still, I did get valuable and great advice on what is wrong just based on the given photos so I thank members for that. I'm curious about the Unreal Reales book and wonder if these informative replies with technical descriptions and ranking or ratings of rarity can be found in the book? I'm a low budget novice, but have strong desire to learn and understand a coin instead of being fooled by them. I'll wager members are contemplating posting "Buy the book before the coin".

Albert The book deals primarily with errors in the way the coins are manufactured. As an authenticator, I was trained to look at the design last. The least important element is the design - also it is impossible to KNOW the correct design for every series ever made.

So I was taught to first check the physical scientific parameters of the coin. The data you need to start with are the alloy used, standard tolerances and the method of manufacture used. This is readily available and easily memorized for most coins you will ever authenticate.

Start with the simple questions first.

1. Is the coin magnetic? If the coin was made with a standard alloy including silver greater than 20% it will NOT be magnetic. Many early numismatic forgeries were made with nickel because it was cheap could be struck easily and it can be artificially toned to resemble silver. It also rings (tone and duration are off but many people do not notice). Iron and nickel are both have magnetic properties and will respond to a magnet. Start with a simple iron magnet.

2. Weight, diameter and most importantly density are the next most important parameters. Each coin series ever made had some standards. Some coins have high levels of tolerance others low. You need to do some research to determine the range. Modern coins often have published tolerance levels. If you are unsure, it is best to think of how the coins were used in commerce. For the 8 Reales these coins were essentially bulk silver. The loss of 5% of the metal weight stopped such coins from circulating at face value in the early US. A deviation in weight can condemn a coin as fraudulent as can a deviation in density.

3. The next step is to evaluate how the coin was made. For this you need to know what the surfaces look like depending on how a coin was made. A casting has one look and a struck coin another. You need to be able to tell the difference even if it is worn, polished or artificially aged. Experience is the best teacher so look at coins of known origin. Always look with a 10-30X loupe until you become comfortable with the differences in texture, stria and what die breaks look like. Very few mints ever cast their coins and you need to know which mints and when.

4. If the coin was properly manufactured, you can move onto how was the die prepared. You need to read about and study the processes used to make dies - hub, punch, engraving and the various transfer technologies used by forgers. These all have a starting date based on when the technology was used. A genuine Portrait 8R was never made using hubbed dies, but counterfeit types were.

5. When reviewing how a coin in hand was made follow one principle - no coin could possibly be made before the technology that was used was invented. Here you need to understand when technologies were introduced. Most of these are covered in my book. They are critical because you can distinguish old from new and appropriate from inappropriate methods this way.

6. The next step is the design of the coin itself. You only need this step if the preceding ones all confirm that the coin MAY be genuine. I usually rely on graded examples of coins but with some caution. Not all graded coins are in fact genuine so you need to gather numerous examples from all of the top tier grading services PCGS (basically for US coins - world coins like 8Rs are iffy), NGC, ANACS (great for authenticity in particular when Mike Fahey was involved) and ICG (best for world coins generally).

7. The last step is XRF or other advanced techniques. This is a last resort only needed very rarely.

This is the process I have used for about 50 years and it works. The first 5 steps take a few minutes at most. The 6th an hour or so and the 7th can take weeks. This is why the 30 seconds allowed for authentication by most TPG's will never work.

Not sure if this the most conclusive method, but to me, the massive blob in the dentils on the reverse (castle side) at 3 O'clock was enough to write off this coin immediately. This was the first thing that just jumped out to me. The second thing was the detail in the globes. I've seen enough of these to know that the details within are "veiny" in appearance. This looks like a bunch dots punched in.

For a coin masquerading as an XF-AU piece, the detail here is waaaaayyy too mushy.

The Cud is actually a chip in the mold or in the die that made this coin. The chip extends only to the rim of the coin not to the edge as it should. The coins struck in open sided presses DO NOT HAVE DISTINCT RAISED OR LOWERED RIMS EXTENDING BEYOND THE DIE FACE.

That "rim" is the problem there is no way to create one on a screw press since the planchet is smaller than the die face and the planchet is struck to the absolute edge of the planchet.

Here is a sketch of how a strike in a screw press happens.



There are two dies called the hammer and anvil. The lower die is the anvil and it is solidly mounted in the press. It is the stationary die. The upper die is the hammer and it travels up and down. It is mounted on the end of a threaded rod that is rotated by a pair of men who spin a pair of counterweights on a long transverse arm. Orientation of the upper die to the lower is maintained by a vertical track (the die does not turn). The force needed to strike an 8R required weights that weighing hundreds of pounds mounted at the ends of a long (ten foot +/-) cast iron beam.

Each die has "dentils" engraved into the die face around the perimeter of the die face. These stop just short of the edge of the die. I colored the dentil area red on each die.

Planchets are circular and flat and are SMALLER in diameter than the die face. (Colored gray). In most cases after 1755 the edge design was added to the planchet BEFORE the coin was struck. The finished diameter of the coin is large enough to include fractional dentils around the entire circumference but not large enough to show the complete dentils for 360 degrees. (There are a very few exceptions.) These were anti-counterfeiting measures so that the edges could not be filed to steal silver.

The hammer die traveled up and down continuously to avoid the loss of momentum. Speed was considered essential and the operators were paid by how many coins were produced.

The planchet was placed by hand on the surface of the anvil die by a person sitting in front of the press. His job was to remove struck coins after the strike and place a new planchet on the die before the hammer returned. There was no centering feature on these presses so the position was somewhat random.

So on a screw press strike, the dentils should run off the edge of the coin stopping exactly at the arc forming the edge.

Instead of that the edge of this coin has a raised rim that cuts off the dentils. This is impossible.

Notice that the Cud occurs INSIDE the raised rim.