England Or Fujian Province China?

pictures with too much glare

note Chinese normally dont get it right due to fact that their techniques and materials are not good, that's why.

As far as I can tell its still good but I can not determine enough that I would call it real or fake, especially due to the high value of this coin in such a grade.

The pic is not good enough for a proper assessment.
However the reverse beading looks all wrong.

Continuing my masterclass series on spotting premium grade counterfeit Australian coins:

Imagery taken by Nikon bridge zoom in macro mode.
Axially inverted tripod under natural light.
Shadowing doesn't help, but it's the best quality I could do on a cloudy day.



Benchmark MS66 - finest known



What is right - almost everything
What is wrong ->


That doesn't look right.
I'm no expert on Emu legs, most of my experience is with chicken legs -
however I think as a general rule - legs should be attached to the body.

At this point, I decided to take a few of my own 1915L florins to the electronics lab -
and chuck em under the microscope:




Okay, at this point basically I have no idea whatsoever is going on.
[Those two images are genuine high grade PCGS examples 55/58]

Time to look at another one - not mine this time..58


and MS63:


Both Emu's legs are definitely attached to their body.

What I'm seeing here is that on elite grade examples there is a clear metallic flow into the Emu -
but not as evident on some lower graded coins.

The circled area above has a shadow at the exact point I want to examine and is inconclusive.
I cannot visually delineate the boundary on that with any real confidence.

The date, star, shield, COA, scroll, grass, and surface look okay, it pings well and weight is 11.31 grams which is correct.

Further testing is needed:

What do you think?

conclusion to follow...

Yes.

Here is the old breed of Chinese fake:
I don't have this but did find this photo on a Google search.



Broken Emu leg, date - many obvious indicators it is fake.
Several of these unfortunately sold as real on ebay.

The sole purpose here is to find a quick way to recognize the new fakes.

These high grade counterfeits have a misalignment.
The 'I' in FLORIN is between and slightly to the right of two denticles.



On genuine early florins the 'I' in FLORIN lines up with the right hand side of a rim denticle.



This applies to the 1911, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1914h, 1915h 1916 1917 1918 1919 & 1921

Lots of things are misaligned, but I like this as a simple and quick way to identify counterfeits.

Interesting stuff.

If nothing else, a brightly-toned coin that tops the finest known seems a little improbable.