Hello everyone.....
When silver was above $28, I took the liberty of selling some stuff that I didn’t want. I listed a bunch of stuff for sale and was surprised at how quickly most of it sold.
Anyway, I made some nice money on what I sold. So I took the profits from it and decided to try and find a graded Morgan silver dollar for my collection that I am missing.
For those of you that don’t know I’ll quickly repeat what I’m trying to accomplish. I’m a completionist, but happen to love the Morgan silver dollars. Since obtaining the entire series of Morgan’s in all the different mints in a grade acceptable to me is an impossibility.
I dissected the series to business strike Philadelphia mint coins only, and in a grade of MS64. Business strike only because in 1895 there was only a proof version struck and only 500 were minted. Zero chance of me touching that.
I have put quite a dent in this series over the last few years, and now I’m to the point of finding the last six I’m missing. Three of the coins are extremely pricy and will not be obtained any time soon unless a windfall comes my was.
There are a few that are very hard to find in that grade and when they do become available they are snatched up quite quickly.
Well I have all of the coins I’m missing in saved searches on several auction houses, EBay and two coin forums. So when i have time I go through them and see if any are listed.
It just so happened that one that I was missing and one of the harder ones to obtain was just listed. I contacted the buying to send me specific pictures before I made the purchase.
After viewing what he sent, i tried to negotiate a better price. Which I did sort of.......
I ended up basically getting the price down to where the tax and shipping equalled what his original asking price was.
In my opinion it was a score.....
So without further ado.....
I am going to share this lovely lady with you. It’s an 1878 7over8 tail feathers Morgan silver dollar graded by PCGS as an MS64.
No known mintage is known on these. There are technically four versions of the 1878 Philadelphia strike coin.
The first is with 7 tail feathers. Which has a know mintage of 950,000. The second is with 8 tail feathers which has a known mintage of 9.7 million. The third is what I am about to show you which is a 7 over 8 tail feathers. Which also has two variations. A “Weak” strike and a “Strong” strike. The weak strike can be obtained fairly easily but the strong strike is a bitch to find. The last version is an 1878 with the reverse of an 1879. The way to tell is on the reverse the 1878 has parallel arrows and the 1879 has slanted arrows.
Sorry I know this is a lot of information to process. But long story short the experts say there isn’t more then 5,000 of the 7 over 8, or the reverse of 79 in existence.