caloundracats

@Turkish, thanks! Definitely agree with the  Rwandan’s do have the best Lunar Rooster...to be honest, the Rwandan Lunars are the only Lunars I have in my collection. I think you made a good choice with the Oriental border Britannias. And I have done similar with taking some sound advice from other savvy members on The Silver Forum. Of which, @coinosseur has a great book he has written and @caloundracats I believe may have a couple of copies left for sale. This might be of help as well...
 

I buy art to look at and enjoy.
 I never buy from any swanky dealer, most of my art has come from young artists or out of fashion artists who i like.  It's quite funny how a so called experts opinion can carry so much weight, I bought a painting direct from an Artist who i know who is quite well known it is signed it has a receipt and a letter, a so called expert reviewed the painting and proclaimed it a fake which i know it isn't as i had bought it and seen the artist paint some of the painting.   I had to get the Artist to directly tell the 'expert' that it wasn't a fake, so there you have it the experts are not so expert.  
Opinions are everything in art,  'a rich mans opinion is worth a lot of weight, 2 rich mens opinions are worth even more and 3 even more, the quality of the painting is secondary'.       

He most certainly does like hands. I was drawn to the Trust sculpture whilst I walked past an art gallery window. It had a lot of meaning to my wife when she saw it as it reminded her of when I looked after her when she was ill. I stayed off work at the time and wouldn't leave her side.
And there's me thinking it just looked nice 

Whilst the forum was down for maintenance I received my Route 66 Missouri silver shields. I only ordered two of them but another envelope arrived at the same time with my name on with two more. I contacted the seller to let them know there's been a mistake as I never put an order in for the extra two.
Didn't want to leave him out of pocket as that's been dishonest, so he let me have them at a lower price. The other year the same thing happened twice to me with two  other companies. I posted on the forum about it at the time but for it to happen a third time with yet another seller is surprising! Top marks to EJP for the lower price, not too low to give them away, even though they nearly did 

2oz silver gilded ruthenium Unicorn.
Each coin max mintage of 200.
 

1/4 dragon for unborn daughters set  

Wonderful @NRSovereign

This is for @caloundracats , this also arrived today, the wife bought me as a present to read while I am incapacitated, I am really pleased with it, to say its this years, A4 sized, 220 pages and full of photographs and all this for only £7 from Amazon ( think its worth more than double this) , infact it says in the back 'published by Amazon' which I wasnt aware they did, it shows many coins and their mintage if known some older ones too, he goes into all aspects of collecting and stacking, he briefly covers silver bars but this is more coin orientated, he talks about all the naughtys that JP Morgan have done and others names connected with silver.
It might not be for the more advanced collecter/stackers out there, but is superb reading for the new to experienced stackers like me.
Wonder if the author is on this forum I really hope he writes more books, one on silver bars would be great.
Pictured below is one of the first ever automatic pistols designed and made, the Belgian FN Browning model 1900, in .32 ACP / 7.65mm, this gun the 1st pattern and made in 1906 (later guns just had FN on the grips).
Another one of John Brownings designs it was his first ever automatic pistol that he designed and sold to Fabrique National, he also designed the .32 ACP cartridge to go with this gun and this was the first to use it.
The gun had some quite unique features for its time and still today, despite being a large gun the ammo capacity is only 7 rounds, this is due to the recoil spring being on top of the barrel instead of below or around the barrel itself, also worthy of note is the sights, unless the gun is cocked and ready to fire a small bar pops up blocking your ability to aim, this can also be felt in the dark as an indication of whether or not your gun was ready to fire.
The gun was used by many countrys by their police and later by the military as trench sweepers during WW1, females were catered for again, being able to defend themselves when travelling the wild areas of the world like Africa and Australia was important, there was two grades of purse holsters available, one was sequinned and the other (shown here) which I think was made of nubuck.
A woman called Fanny Kaplin used one of these guns to try and assasinate Lenin, one of the bullets remained lodged in his body and it wasnt possible to remove it and it was said that this was what made him increasingly ill until his death.
The gun was produced from 1900 - 1911.
 

 


 

 

 

 

@mr1030 Another email response received this morning GMT.
Hi,  thanks for your message back.  The Coins of the World series and all our statues are available to the global market.  I don't have any retail partners in the EU yet.  We do ship to the UK, but I know that comes with a high customs/ duty.  I recently shipped a statue to a customer and his duty was only 5% using the following code:
 
925 Silver Statue
HS Tariff No. 9705000020
VAT reduced rate 5% - Duty Exempt
For a $1200 statue, the VAT was 50. GBP
We are currently relocating to a larger facility in Singapore and have disabled retail sales on our website until we are fully up and running again.  I expect to be back online with new models by October 15th.
Might see if I can get one from the US after all! 

Just a little bit of table candy delivered today!
 

My first graded coin ever, plan to keep hold of this until next year, I bought it as I felt like spending money so I would rather spend it on something I can get my money back on than something I can't.

Back from grading my two standouts. Thanks to @Numistacker. The Sov is only one of 13 graded at PF 70 at NGC. Not too shoddy considering the COA was in the 9000's. Well done Royal Mint ?.

 

Bought my first Sovereign today at Hatton Garden Metals. Best price I could find in town and as I moved to the UK recently I now need to get me some Capital Gains Tax free coins.

Opps.... 2oz, you can tell I'm new at this

Nothing ultra rare here, but still very collectable.

Recently @msagan75 contacted us about a trade and we were very happy to add one of his pieces to our stack!
The only problem is which one? He does so many sweet pours and we had to decide together. Well we haven't made it 28 years by fighting over little things so we told him, his choice! We love to give the artist a free hand to do something they enjoy or wanted to try that is our favorite way to add to our community box. So we sent out our side of the trade and today we received our piece in the mail!

when we opened it there was a sweet metal COA a pretty velvet box and a STICKER!!! we love stickers and this one is so very cool!!!

It had been a few days of anticipation

makeagif.com
so together we opened the soft black velvet bag

What an awesome Thor's Axe Stormbreaker was the weapon of early Thor and after he lost his hammer he went back to his stand by the Jarnbjorn that can cut through anything as it is blessed with Thor's Blood! This is an awesome piece,it is fun to hold with a great weight balance, you feel like it could be a little magic. Here is another look at this gorgeous piece!

Dixiesilvergirl definitely is a fan of things comic book hero's and Thor is at the top of the list(right after Hulk) so she is pretty excited!
Thanks for an awesome trade and if you haven't already seen his sweet pours give him a follow on the following social media sites;
https://www.instagram.com/msagan75/
https://www.youtube.com/user/msagan75
https://www.facebook.com/msagan75
and you can also find him on www.metalsmafia.com
Thanks for reading and happy stacking!

@mr1030 The company Heads and Tales are in the process of moving from Thailand to Singapore. Their new website will be up in October, so they tell me.
You are fortunate as it appears that the Britannia statue and the other monetary ones are only available in the USA. Would love to purchase some but with postage, customs duties, VAT (sales tax) on top of the price, it would certainly add up!
From what I can gather, they are doing a series of 'world coins', the American Eagle, the Libertard, the Britannia, Kookaburra, with others to come in the form of these statues. Also in the pipeline are the Queen's Beasts although I don't find them so appealing as the ones above.
I must say, email communication was by return so am looking forward to doing business with them in the future (I hope). I suggested they are missing out on business by only supplying said statues to the USA although some of their small animals ones are available elsewhere in the world.
If you would be so kind, please advise who you purchase from in the USA? My research led me to three sources but only one would ship overseas although the above added costs may make purchase excessively expensive.

Absolutely f@@@ing stunning

A REAL PIECE OF ART GORGEOUS SHE IS ?????

Could of been worse mate, your statue pics could of been like this 

Yesterday I got this stunning example of the Australian 1927 parliament house florin 

I love this. 

Great looking Britannia. Had a look at the website and think the Soaring Eagle is the best IMHO. Would happily display that taking pride of place.

Wow! Very beautiful! Can i ask you where you bought this @mr1030?

Technology is certainly a 2-edge sword. Great for so many things. But...... for all the good things there are corresponding bad ones. Re mobiles, I am personally sick to death of hearing other people's conversations - no respect for privacy... I don't want or need to hear about the ins and outs of peoples lives, what they did last night, how the house purchase/divorce/holiday plans are going etc. To my way of thinking, a conversation on a mobile is still a private communication between two people and not for the world to hear about. How often do you see people in the supermarket ringing wife/husband/partner..... do we need such and such. Surely they have some idea of what they are going to buy when they leave the house. As for people walking down the street glued to their mobiles... don't get me started! 
Yes, they are wonderful in so many ways but by the looks of the general population who seem to be glued to mobiles, I despair. Totally absorbed without a clue of the real life around them. Fed a lot of ******** by large social media organisations. No wonder the country has gone downhill. Many cannot think for themselves and have to follow the crowd - rather pathetic in my opinion.
However, they do allow us to access some much information that we would previously not had access to. And communicate with people across the globe. I do wonder what will happen if all signals go out for some reason, satellites fail, sun spots. or some other reasons.  How will the mobile phone generation cope? They can't even read a map! Rant over.