Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
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| 2 Franc Coin - 1938 |
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| Reverse of Same 1938 2 Franc Coin |
I've been going through a lot of foreign coin finds lately. A good number of older ones are from a cache, and some that are not as old are old beach finds that I just put aside, not knowing much about them.
A lot of Canadian coins were found in Hollywood Florida over the years, for example. A lot of those I showed in the magnet demonstration yesterday were from there.
Here is a photo showing the two 1938 French coins that I'm showing today. As you can see, the 2-franc coin is much bigger than the 50 centimes coin. Otherwise they are very similar.
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| 1938 2 Francs Compared to 1938 Fifty Centimes. |
Below is the fifty centimes coin. I should wipe this one off.
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| 1938 2 Centime Coin. |
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| Reverse of Same 1938 2 Centime Coin. |
A good magnet can be used in a lot of ways.
You can actually test silver with a neodymium magnet. Silver won't snap to it like ferrous metals, but you can slightly move silver with it.
If you have an old dead computer around, you can find a neodymium magnet by taking the hard drive apart.
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I never seriously searched for coins up until a few weeks ago. I started looking through bunches of old coins. I hate the idea of missing a valuable old coin simply because I didn't look or didn't know any better. What I learned is that like with a lot of things, it takes time and practice to become effective. It is more complicated and difficult than I expected.
Everybody has heard of double-die coins, and how they can be valuable. Well, it turns out that there are a lot of kinds of doubling you will see on coins, and most of them are not valuable. You have to learn to tell the difference.
A lot of what first likes a mint error is actually damage that occurred to the coin after it left the mint. It can take some detective work to tell if something is a mint error or not.
There are also a lot of different kinds of coin errors, and many of them you will never see unless you know exactly what to look for. For example, one digit of the date might be a touch smaller on some coins. If you didn't know exactly what to look for, you would never expect the coin to be different or valuable - it would look like a perfectly normal coin.
I was surprised that in learning about errors I had to learn more about the minting process, and some of that applies to silver and gold cobs despite the fact that they were hand punched. They still made die, and those die sometimes got cracked or damaged. You will see some things that are similar on both modern coins and old treasure coins.
There are a heck of a lot of different coins, dates, countries, mints, etc. etc. to know about. There is a lot to learn, but if you decide to get into it seriously, you might enjoy it, and you might even discover something of value. It does take time and effort.
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Looks like we're in for more south winds and one to two foot surf.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
