1913 D Buffalo Grading Help

We'll need pictures.

I'm terrible when it comes to grading Buffalo nickels. I'll guess Unc, maybe high AU at the lowest.

as are most. one of the more challenging series to grade even in hand. fortcollins is the most knowledgeable regarding these and he hasn't chimed in on this one yet.

photos should be direct and not angled at all. overhead light should be avoided as it creates glare obscuring surfaces. a higher grade coin should exhibit luster of some sort. I'm not seeing it here. could be lighting. you'll need to assess that in hand. to my eyes and based on the photo the coin looks cleaned with the original surfaces removed. looks like the rear hock had some die polishing.

UNC details (cleaned)

Your coin appears to be from a known die pair because of the multiple readily identifiable cracks on the obverse. It is LDS (late die state), and the strike is average to soft for 1913 Denver Type I coins. I don't see as many die polishing lines as I would expect. but that may be just the photographs.

I see a couple things that make me pause here. The residue on the obverse looks to me to be PVC residue. That sometimes appears as a greenish tinted filmy coating. The black spots and tiny pin-prick pitting on the reverse suggest that a larger area of surface gunk (or corrosion) was removed from the buffalo's rear legs and surrounding areas, and possibly also from the buffalo's front legs and side. The pitting is most evident on the buffalo's left leg and shoulder and on portions of the buffalo's flank. These two situations could be related, and the gunk on the reverse could also have been PVC residue. It's not unusual for older buffs to have black tar-like blobs that reveal corrosion when removed, and that could also have been what left the small black spots around the rear legs.

The Type I Buffalo nickels generally had more detail in the fields than the Type II reverse design. That tends to give them some of the mottled or matte appearance that you mention. Overall, this coin looks like it is either an underlying high AU or UNC coin, but the PVC residue and reverse issues would detail the coin. Others may have ideas here, but I do not know of any way to remove PVC residue without damaging the coin further. I don't see obvious circulation wear or excessive contact marks, so this coin originally might have been a mid-UNC, before the reverse residue and obverse PVC issues.

I wish I had better news here, but that's the best I can do from these photos.