1755 8 Reales From Mexico Real Or Fake

Gonzalo de Sandoval Hello - in my opinion the coin is a forgery. There are several reasons.

1. The coin has many small pores in the surface that survived the polishing of the mold.

2. The dentils especially at the ET IND are very poorly formed. They appear to be engraved.

3. The field of the coin do not match the texture of the raised portions of the coin in areas where the punch should have smoothed the surfaces.

4. Soft die breaks in the rosettes and the Pomegranate

5. The rough texture on the sides of the letters and sharply defined features.

6. Lack of sharp transitions.

7. The edge design is too variable to be real.

Overall this cast impression is very similar to a 1750 that I recently received in the mail for appraisal. In that case the weight was similar to this one (26.89 grams) but the SG was 9.79 - far too low to be an original - about 600 fine. I suspect an SG test would produce similar results in this case.

The date of manufacture of any forgery can be placed anytime after the technology used to make the forgery was developed. That is a very OBVIOUS conclusion to draw - but it is one that many collectors somehow miss. I am always surprised by supposed "contemporary circulating counterfeits" which were made with technologies not developed until decades or even hundreds of years AFTER the originals were made.

One of the key elements in counterfeit collecting is distinguishing between the Circulating and Non-Circulating varieties of counterfeits. There are a few steps I go through mentally when I face that question especially with a brand new variety.

The first question I ask is when did the coin in question LEAVE circulation? Why? Forgers making fakes for circulation copy common CIRCULATING coins. Again that is an obvious fact, but missed more times than I can count.

The next question(s) I ask deal with How the die was created? How the counterfeit was produced? And what metal was used? These are interrelated questions. Dies can be made in many ways but technology changes with time. Cast dies made in materials strong enough to strike silver are VERY recent. Certain types of manufacture like closed chamber strikes can also be dated. Finally in some cases, the metal can be used to date a coin.

As an example of these points consider the following question. Is it logical to think that a Pillar 8R made with German Silver was a circulating counterfeit? To make this decision you need two facts you may not know. First, the Pillar dollar was out of circulation by the 1830s. Second German Silver was first introduced in the mid to late 1830's and was not seen in counterfeits before 1839. So the correct conclusion is that NO PILLAR DOLLAR FORGERIES IN GERMAN SILVER WERE MADE TO CIRCULATE.

Cast copies of this particular type have been possible since at least 1960 perhaps a bit earlier, but certainly NOT before WWII.

This coin is NOT a Contemporary Counterfeit.

But when was it made?

The metal used might provide a clue. Silver was not often used before 1970 to forge foreign coins (at least not the types we encountered in Boston). In my experience if it is silver, (check with SG) you can narrow the date a bit and say it was made sometime after 1970.

But even though the technology has been available for a long time (50-60 years) the question of whether it was used on a particular type of coin is a different issue. The Pillar series was never overly popular so I expect that forgeries of this nature were made later in time when the materials needed became more available and cheaper.

In my records I document very few Pillar forgeries done well and made of silver prior to 1990. The ones I saw before that date all had very poorly executed edges as if no one before then noticed. Your coin has a rather well executed edge. So I would place it in a very recent category.

As a PURE guess based on what I have seen in the market place, I would put the date of manufacture as not much more than 15 years ago. Of course it may have been made last month. So the best guess I can muster is 1995 to Present.

All Modern Non-Circulating forgeries fall into the same class - they are all Numismatic Forgeries. Their value is actually the melt value of the metal involved. However, collectors of forgeries like myself often add a few dollars over melt just to keep these fakes out of the recycle bin.