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Steve D'Ippolito

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About Steve D'Ippolito

  • Birthday 01/01/1913

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  1. TWO dollars? Wow. That's a new one for me. I've had plenty of clerks figuring they were dollars. Perhaps you're in an area where Sacajaweas and Presidential dollars circulate at least a little bit? (Apparently cities in the East that have more mass transit use those coins somewhat with their rail systems.)
  2. That is surprising...I wasn't aware that the mint was making any other than for mint or proof sets any more. Clearly, they made enough to ship 'em to Ecuador. Edit: Apparently in recent years you could also direct order small numbers of them, but you'd pay nearly double.
  3. I hit three coin shows a year, the two ANA ones, and the Colorado Springs Coin Show. Maybe I'll do the Denver Coin expo too. I've noticed an interesting pattern...unless it's a truly spectacular piece (which goes into "Platinum Night" where they sell absolutely no platinum), Heritage can actually be relatively cheap, because most of their customer base for that sort of thing is dealers, and they want it at wholesale. At least that's my theory; I've done OK at their auctions. (Note to heirs: Do NOT consign my stuff to Heritage....you won't even get wholesale for a lot of it.)
  4. I suspect that it's 10kt or so plating. Once upon a time, I got a piece of gold bling from my employer when I hit 25 years. I figured it was 10kt gold plated, snorted derisively (if you're going to put a microscopically thin layer of gold costing all of a dime or two on a piece of pot metal, at least make it more than 50 percent pure!), and it really didn't look all that golden. Then I finally realized it was solid 10kt gold (plenty heavy). But the gold looked awfully...tan at that level of (im)purity. I'd actually would rather have gotten a smaller item with a higher percentage of gold in it, so it would at least look like it was gold!
  5. Oh, I guess I was a bit ambiguous...I'm thinking the pin bar might be solid brass. After all, they could hang anything from it, a bronze medal, silver or... On the other hand, they could have made it match whatever hung off of it, silver, bronze or gold. The first option would be something someone might do for efficiency/economy's sake. You'd certainly know. The medal itself--I agree it would make no sense to brass plate silver. That was my first thought, but as I was writing I thought better of it and tried to efface that from my post (I guess unsuccessfully). I have three medals, gilt silver...and the gold has developed bright red and purple splotches. Rather alarming! It turns out the gold plating is very thin (thin enough that when someone did an X-ray fluorescence, it could "see" the silver under the gold), and the silver is toning under the gold. Based on that experience, I'm thinking something similar could have happened to the back of the medal, some of the gold plating rubbing away (someone proudly wore it a lot), and the silver tarnishing through the now-thin layer. Was there any indication of the purity of the gold plate?
  6. It'd be nice if they didn't have to get into politics just to ensure that old traditions like these got to continue.
  7. If it is gold over silver, I wonder why it has blackened areas. The pin bar (if that's what it's called), I would guess is actually brass. The back of the medal itself, I am guessing, has had some of the plating rub off and the black there is silver tarnish. (I learned recently silver will tarnish even through a very thin layer of gold; thicker plating will block it.) Brass or gold, it's a beautiful design and no doubt someone wore it proudly!
  8. I did, but it was directly off a dealer's site (one I have trust in), which to me is a bit different from buying off ebay from "who knows who?" It was effectively no different from mail order from someone's price list would have been fifty years ago.
  9. I showed a friend of mine the 1909 cent and he launched off on a tirade about how he never finds stuff like that. The very next day he found a very, very worn 1924 dime on the sidewalk. I tell people this now at club meetings and tell them if the want to rant and rave at me about how they never find cool stuff, I am here to serve.
  10. Yeah, I had that ("medal turn") in the post originally but must have edited it out before I hit post (it was originally twice as long and quite repetitively...repetitive). Good catch!
  11. Spotted another one. As I mentioned before I became aware of three "new" types I was missing at Summer Seminar, and one of them I filled at the ANA show. I filled another one on Monday.
  12. I see that St. George's helmet is unusually well defined too. Looks like, for whatever reason, the coin is fully struck at the top. Perhaps the planchet was slightly thicker there. (For any non-Russian-specialist who might be reading this and thinking I got something wrong, Russia used (and still uses, as far as I know), "coin" turn where the top of the coin on one side is opposite the top of the coin on the other side (and you flip a coin over left-to-right), unlike the case with US coinage, where the top of the reverse is opposite the bottom of the obverse (and you flip a coin over top to bottom). So the helmet and crown are indeed directly opposite each other.
  13. For a long time I simply accumulated the state quarters. I had some vague notion of keeping a roll of the the best ones from each mint & for each state. I finally just gave up trying to keep up with it, dumped the whole mess into an ammo can, and went to the bank, which has a machine in the lobby that issues a receipt you can go deposit in your account. It was $1000.75. Nice, when one is unemployed (as I was at the time).
  14. I do remember those medals--I was a tourist once at the UN. Odd to have one turn up in such a place, eh? Cool find! 81 and newer? That's an unusual distribution. Generally you can tell when someone stopped putting coins in a jar, because there's nothing newer. Nothing older? That would mean someone was systematically filtering out coins older than a certain date--easily done if someone's not putting wheaties in that jar, or something like that, but 1981 is an odd cutoff for that (and besides, it's more likely they'd be saving the wheaties and spending the rest). Now if it was 81 and older it would make sense, someone saved coppers and spent zinkys (and decided to forgo 1982 because they couldn't tell the difference and would rather let a copper go than have a zinky be in their stash).
  15. Of course, I say this... but just paid well over Redbook in a hard fought auction earlier this week. I finally got the piece on Friday morning and...yes, it does deserve that premium I mentioned. I'll likely post a photo later, in a different thread (I take photos after dark to avoid ambient light pollution).
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