Actually some do, explore the coins to your hearts content and have a good time doing it. Don't let anyone tell you different. Especially not me. Just keep in mind that everyone is looking for and at different aspects of coins and on a forum, they are going to voice their thoughts good and bad.
Where the confusion seems to come into play is what is a variety and what is a simple manufacturing error that impacts appearance. I'm all for varieties, but chasing examples of sloppy work has never personally appealed to me. It's one of the reasons I'm not all that interested in Heaton Mint minor varieties... it's bad work that created most of them and I can't respect that. I want the perfect strike, the best lustre, I don't care where the numeral 1 is in relation to the rim. I didn't build a collection for value though I know it has some.
Reviewing the manufacturing process technology at the time, they actually could have done a better job.
Given that, my own interest basically moved to finding near perfectly struck examples from the
RCM here in Canada. They generally seemed better struck to me overall with the exception of early nickel five cent pieces which almost always look wishy washy.
Still, explore to your hearts content and share your observations, that's how other people get interested in what's going on with their coins.
I hate plated coins by the way, not because they're plated but because they are the cheapest possible examples of metal discs using the cheapest plating process ever built on a large scale. That means to me finding a perfect coin has gotten all that much harder. The surfaces generally look like crap and even the uncirculated sets this year have an absolutely awful finish. Way to go Winnipeg. I decided this flipping through a box of dimes in 2009 looking for the one or two potential stunners that might be in a bankers box of new dimes. It's like picking the best of the worst. It makes me sad and then I retreat to a point in time before the
RCM got their proof presses and I'm all happy again because you can actually find near perfect struck examples of coins made with outdated equipment , that says someone was concerned at some point about how the coins actually looked.
Keep in mind, people who write about coins and sell coins do read forums just like these. The potential profit to be had from a numismatist no matter how new to coins finding a variety that might be sought after is just too great to ignore.
Happy hunting, take the good with the bad.
Posted 03/30/2011 7:12 pm
