1834 Mexican 8R With Counterstamps

jfransch - you asked about the weight and could the forgery be determined by weight.

You need to do a Specific Gravity to detect the fact you are dealing with GS. The weight is easily adjusted by making the coin slightly thicker than it should be.

Numismat I believe the counterstamps are MODERN, but they could be a few decades old. The 1959 article on forged YII stamps did not indicate a modern fake with a closed circle of dots - so the counterfeit stamp must have been made after 1959.

Hey, if this helps--I looked up the specific gravity for GS: ~8.5, which is quite different from "coin silver": 10.31 or sterling: 10.36. Here Swamperbob wrote a method for measuring specific gravity, which I adapted to a simple pocket scale/harness setup--it works!

I agree totally that the stamp looks real, but it is real for 1835. The fact it looked real was why I was initially very interested in this coin. The host is definitely counterfeit and if the stamp was real - it would fall in a very rare class of "officially" recoined counterfeits. I own VERY few as they are really rare. The price of $331 would actually be low if the stamp was real.

However, fortunately for me - the host here is my favorite counterfeit type. I have owned one or more of these "Chicken Eagles" since I was 12 years old. Right now I own 56 different copies of that particular coin. I am very familiar with the way the dies deteriorated and I can state without fear of contradiction that based on the wear to this die pair that the coin is German Silver not Debased Silver. By the time the dies looked like this the counterfeiter had turned to GS for planchets. I have never seen a debased silver copy of this coin with that amount of wear. The silver copies are very scarce and they are very early die states.

If you notice the superscripts on the Z, D and G you will see that the s's no longer look like s's. They have already turned to rectangular blobs. In addition the star in front of the 8R is already deformed. As I stated earlier, the forgers kept recutting this die pair to "help" the image.

I believe the coin circulated successfully during the Hard Times because many people believed it really was silver. This false impression was bolstered by the publication of Riddell's Monograph in 1845. Riddell initially intended his book as a sort of REDEMPTION guide for counterfeits. For each coin he published the silver content so that debased coins could be redeemed at a discounted intrinsic value. He lists the #237 as having a value of 70 cents. Of course if the counterfeiters knew this - they could reduce the silver content. Which I believe they did. Riddell's book as a redemption guide was a dismal failure - but to establish a time line for the dies it is an invaluable snap shot in time (1839-1844).

Also the way the Thialand stamp fractured the planchet - there is little chance this is a silver coin.

The date of the counterstamp provided by the table in the last post is great confirming data. The stamp date is 1835 - an that is proof positive that a GS counterfeit is impossible.

No problem - you can use the discussion on the other forum and if you have any further questions or comments I would be interested in hearing them.

Is it a German silver or low grade silver coin?







Nickel silver is a metal alloy of copper with nickel and often but not always zinc. It is named for its silvery appearance, but contains no elemental silver unless plated. Other common names for this alloy are German silver, paktong, new silver and alpacca (or alpaca).


Nickel silver or German silver is first known in China, and was known in the west from imported wares called paktong or pakfong (literally "white copper") where the silvery metal colour was used to imitate sterling silver. According to Berthold Laufer, it was identical with khar sini, one of the seven metals recognized by Geber. It was discovered to be a copper-nickel-zinc alloy in the 18th century. In 1770 the Suhl (Germany) metalworks were able to produce a similar alloy and in 1823 a competition was initiated to perfect the production process by creating an alloy that possessed the closest visual similarity to silver. The brothers Henniger in Berlin and A. Geitner in Schneeberg independently achieved this goal. Alpacca became a widely known name in northern Europe for nickel silver after it was used as a trademark brand by the manufacturer Berndorf. A form of German silver was also invented in Birmingham, England in 1832.

Nickel silver became widely used after 1840 with the development of electroplating, as it formed an ideal strong and bright substrate for the plating process. It was also used unplated in applications such as cheaper grades of cutlery.

Thanks swamperbob for the clarification.
I have a number of countermarked coins and it is silver with crack due to the stamping. What can you say about this? This is very interesting and a topic to learn.

Thanks swamperbob, very interesting topic