bobh

Maybe I should get out the India ink and try putting some cryptic markings on my coins? https://www.sincona.com/auction/The%20SINCONA%20Collection%20-%20Part%202_Nicholas%20II,%201868-1918.aspx?rownum=24&backid=ib635178228985958327&lager=00020&los=973&ActiveID=1062&lang=de

Awesome coin, alexbq2! Congratulations!

I would call it a token. In the United States in the early 20th century, pennies were sometimes enclosed in a similar ring, usually made of aluminium. They were sold as good luck tokens. With this one, the coin is probably real -- although this might be a good way to dispose of some of the fake 10 rouble pieces which surface now and then -- you can't see the edge, anyway.

Thanks, Igor! Unfortunately I can't go on Monday the 14th, but depending on what is being offered, I may go on Tuesday or Wednesday. Depends on whether or not I can rearrange my teaching schedule. It would be nice to meet in person!

Thanks -- I was wondering which was the most complete reference. Looks like I will be buying this!

Thanks! Mine also has rotated dies ... I wonder if it is the same variety? If so, I think I got a real bargain!

I just bought a lot of Civil War tokens in an auction in Germany. One of them is apparently OH-165N-12a. It has an Indian bust on one side and a store card die on the other: "500,000 persons annually cured by Dr. Bennett's Medicines" The only token reference I have is Rulau, but it doesn't seem to be listed there. With Google, I could only find links to auction sites. Anybody have an online reference which might have more detailed information about this one? Thanks!

The first and third images look very similar (stars), but the third is slightly rotated (0.5 ~ 1.0 degree) with respect to the first. I would say that the second image is very different than either the 1st or 3rd.

Hard to say. 1904 is one of the most common years for this series, and most people don't bother with the edge at all. Not really worth faking because it is so common, unless there is some other metal in it being passed off for gold. And those fakes usually are easily recognizable by errors in the design. Until perhaps 10 years ago, these later-date gold coins were only selling for their bullion value plus a small mark-up for condition. As to the edge varieties, very little research has been done in that area, so if there is something unusual on the edge, probably just as many people will scream "Fake!" as will say: "What an interesting variety!" Of course, the situation would look a bit different if there was "ЭБ" on the edge... no way those initials could be made by a defective edge device.

There is probably nothing wrong with the coin if it is really gold (not gold-plated) -- other details look OK to me. The correct mintmaster initials would be "AP". There is the possibility that the device used to strike the edge had a broken "P" which made it look like "Г". You might want to compare the letters with other coins which are struck with both AP and AГ. There is another possibility, too: the Soviet government struck a large quantity of gold coins for paying foreign debt using old dies from the imperial coins of Nicholas II in the early years, sometime after 1920. Since many governments were reluctant to recognize the new Soviet coinage, they were able to pay these countries with older gold coins. But sometimes they used the wrong edge device, or perhaps that was the only usable device they could find. You can read about this in Bitkin's catalogue. Here are some edges in Kazakov's catalogue:

Very nice, Steve ... thanks!

This is a fascinating discussion! The question which poses itself here is, if there is such a marked difference in weight between this very rare variety and the normal strikes, then why is there such a correlation? The only reason that I can think of at the moment is that there might have been a need for some heavier coins to act as "remedium" for certain batches, and that the mint workers needed some way of optical recognition of the heavier coins so that they would not have to repeatedly weigh them again and again. But if only some of these coins with narrow monogram were overweight, this theory wouldn't hold water, of course...

Welcome to the forum, actelios! That's a very nice rouble you have shown us ... an uncirculated example of the embossed striking variety!

I'll say 1729, but it's a bit of a lottery with this one. The right side of the last digit in the date looks more round than the left side.

Looks like 5/3 to me, too. Also, there seems to be an interesting die clash on the reverse -- between the eagle and the scroll there is what looks like part of the wreath, and there are traces of the monogram close to the head of the eagle on the left. However, the wreath trace looks raised and the monogram trace seems to be incuse. What do you think, shouldn't they both be either raised or incuse if this is indeed a die clash?

To me, it looks like good VF/XF details, but with multiple rim knocks. Overall, I'd say VF.

Not the same coin, but cast from the same molds -- similar bubbles left of the crown, a raised spot to the right of the eagle's right wing (from the observer's perspective) and suspicious marks below the "K" and "M" just at the top edge of the scrollbar. The one under the "K" looks like a die crack, except that we now know that these "coins" were not produced by striking.

Wouldn't there be bubbles hidden right underneath the surface which would appear after filing?

Lacquer?

I was also thinking of the novodel possibility. One aspect I find puzzling, though, is that the edges of the raised devices (letters, feathers, etc.) don't look quite as sharply struck as they do on the image of the other (darker) coin further up in this thread, although there are more traces of circulation on the darker coin (i.e. in the next-to-last post before this one, it is at the right of the lighter coin being discussed presently -- not the lower image of a coin in VF grade). The lighter-color coin looks uncirculated to me. I would expect the strike to appear much sharper as a result, especially if it were a specially prepared novodel -- even if original dies were used. But this might be just a difference in lighting and/or focus. One would have to be able to see the real coin in order to make a definite statement about that.

The most famous example of such coins is probably the Avesta mint 5 kopeck fakes from the late 1700's which have found their place (rightly so) in respected catalogues and auctions today. Were you referring to this type of forgery?

Is this some kind of overdate? On both coins, it looks like something is under the "3" ... traces of a "1", maybe?

Huh??? Guess I need to sell my shares of AAPL right away! AFAIK, Access is also the only program in the MS-Office suite which was never ported to Apple. If it is really so great and in-demand, I'm sure they would have done so by now.

And how many of those installations are there just because they are included as part of MS-Office Professional or Visual Studio? How many of those corporations actually use Access for anything meaningful? Of all file-based relational database systems, Access is certainly the least scalable, the least conforming to the SQL standard, and the least portable of all. Depending on one's definition of what an "archaic technology" is, I would say that the latest versions of Access might not be archaic (maybe dBase would fit that description better, although it served its purpose in many ways much better than Access ever did), but Access is certainly not suited for any applications requiring a large remote networked client base such as we have been discussing. And I have worked with all versions of Access starting with 2 on Windows 3.1 up through Access 2000 on Windows XP. Access has such a problem with database corruption that Microsoft has even had to develop "repair" tools to deal with that (ever had to use JETCOMP.EXE?) Even professional database developers advocate splitting the GUI front end from the back end, usually so that when the data grows so large that the Access backend MUST be replaced, you can migrate the front end to use attached tables on some other RDBMS with little effort. The Germans have a saying: "Was der Bauer nicht kennt, das frisst er nicht" (A farmer won't eat anything he isn't familiar with).

Hello Jean, Uzdenikov (I have the 2nd edition) gives a nice explanation about weight control on page 547-549 ... it might be on a different page in other editions. He states that silver coins of the XVIII century could vary from the prescribed 24g by 0.4g. Yours seems a bit heavy, but Uzdenikov also states that even silver and gold coins were weighed in batches. Some individual coins were weighed at random, but apparently not EVERY coin. So if your coin were weighed together with two other roubles, one of exactly 24g and the other 24.4g, the average of all three would be 24.4g and this would be fine. If one of the other roubles were slightly lighter, e.g. 23.6g, the average would then be exactly 24g. If this is the only deviation from the normal genuine coin, then you probably have nothing to worry about.