My experiment

Afternoon everyone…..

Back in August a friend of mine wanted to do a trade with me on a few items that he knew that I had.

So I made the trip to my private security place, and sorted through a few boxes. Thank god I’ve been labeling them all as I bring them home to organize and consolidate.

Once I had the stuff he was interested in, we decided on a day and time to figure out exactly what the trade would be.

My friend George is primarily a coin collector. Not just silver or gold either. His collection is pretty vast and every single coin he owns are raw. Nothing is graded at all.

I’ve explained over and over the money he is leaving on the table when he goes to sell them. Or how screwed his wife or kids will get when they try to sell them in an ungraded state.

He has some coins in his collection that are worth mega money. If they were graded, he has several coins that are worth more then my shop build was each, and a few worth more than my house.

I told him not ever coin has to get graded, but the top 100 or so that he has need to be in order to get the true value from the coin. I have a PCGS membership which I would be happy to send them in for him.

Maybe someday he’ll change his mind.

Well back to the trade….

He was interested in some of my raw Morgan silver dollars. I have roughly fifty or sixty raw Mint state Morgans in air-tites. Yes I brought them all.

Each Morgan is inside a folded up index card that tells what the coin is and what grade I believe it to be. It also has any special indications if there are any.

I do have several raw VAM Morgan dollars. Such as the 1880-O ”Hot Lips” Morgan. I also have a pair of the 1887-P ”Spitting Eagle” Morgan. There are one or two others.

While he wanted one of my ”Spitting Eagle” Morgans. We couldn’t come up with what we both agreed was a fair trade.

He did however take four other Morgans. I was trying to get a $2.5 gold Indian head eagle coin from him but he wouldn’t budge.

So instead….

We agreed upon this piece of Scottsdale Mint bar in trade. It’s a twenty Troy ounce cast bar. I have a few of these already so it was just another bar to me.

Now for the experiment…..

I decided that I was going to use this bar as a paperweight on my desk for atleast a year. I wanted to see if it would just tarnish or if it would get some nice toning.

Here is what my experiment looks like after six months of being handled pretty much daily, sitting out on my desk in the unprotected air.