Ungraded 1914 Gold Hoard $5 And $10 - Thoughts?

Thank you Coinfrog! Is that based on the scratches, the lustre, or combination of factors?
Are the photos clear enough to make a good judgement or should I work on lighting and clarity if I can?

Really appreciate the comment.

They aren't that low I don't believe. My best guess is they would both come in around MS-63 if sent to PCGS. The fields on both are pretty heavily marked up, but that is typical with gold as it's a lot softer than other metals and these coins got moved around in bags A LOT. If you look through coins of the various grades you will see many 64's that look pretty rough too. The devices are marked up a little too on the high points for sure, but the strikes are pretty decent and the overall look is not bad. I suspect that the $5 would come back with a slightly higher grade than the $10 as the reverse in particular looks pretty good and the magnification of the photos makes the $5's look worse than they do in hand because they are smaller. The 1914 $10 is by far the most common coin in the entire series and I would suggest it's probably worth just as much in the RCM holder as it would ever be in a slab. The 1914 $5 one of the rarest coins in the series and, depending on the grade you get back, could be worth sending to a TPG for grading. It's certainly worth more than melt by a ways anyways. :)

Both in the range of 62-63....Get them graded by PCGS and come join one of the smallest subsets on the Set Registry.

It's the nature of gold coins that sat in bags for a century and got moved around a lot.

In my nightmares, I see the mint staff throwing the bags round like rugby, with the occasional bag bursting amid all the laughter.....and being shovelled like coal.

I'm sticking with MS-61 or 62 at best on both.

For what it's worth I guarantee they aren't MS-61. There is not a single example of either type from the gold reserve that graded lower than MS-62. Of the 1914 $5's that graded from the reserve there are 7/328 in the PCGS population that are under MS-63. Just over 2%. In the 1914 $10s there are 112/8812 in the PCGS population. Not much over 1%.

Obviously it's possible, or even likely that there were a small number of lower graded ones that were never submitted, but mostly it's that they had hundreds of thousands of these coins to go through and they essentially tried to keep only the ones that were approximately MS-63 or higher. (they didn't actually grade them, they just looked for a certain higher end look in the ones they kept, but still) With 1.3% of the population of sorted out coins submitted to PCGS being under MS-63 in that year I would venture to say that the chance of both of those being MS-61 to MS-62 is basically zero statistically.

Now just going off the look of the coins (and knowing that we can't accurately determine lustre from those pictures) I think that around 63 is pretty likely. If I was being more specific I think the $10 falls in the MS-62+ to MS-63 range and the $5 falls in the MS-63 to MS-63+ range.

Honestly it's impossible to give a perfect guess of the grade without examining them in hand, but based on what I can see in the quite good pictures submitted by the OP, I'm pretty comfortable with my assessment. I'm not just pulling this out of my butt either, I am a fairly avid collector of this series and own a bunch of them. Tripoli is an even more avid collector than I am and owns some truly spectacular coins in this series. Without a doubt he owns many more than I do and has a lot of examples he can compare to. My point being that our personal opinions on these come with a fair bit of real world familiarity of the entire series.

For what it's worth anyways. :)

Oh thank you all so much!!
I am learning a ton from this forum.
I wish I knew how to tag you in my response, but I can honestly say each response has value to me.

Sincere thanks.