Booky586

Italian gold 20 Lire, 1863, Vittorio Emanuele II.

The auction estimate is £200,000 for an old US shilling found in a sweet tin. I'm just over to eBay to check out that house clearance collection of coins 😀 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-58982457

Item: Gold Italian (LMU), 1863, 20 Lire, Vittorio Emanuele II. Condition: Please view the photo for grade. Price: £280 £270 plus post (£6.85 Special Delivery), UK only. Payment Terms: Bank transfer preferred, PayPal.

They've got some lovely coins, I could be parting with some money. Look at this Athenian beauty:

Ever watched any of BYB videos? I can't concentrate on what he's saying because internally I'm screaming "wear some gloves!"

I'm heading over there right now.

Chamone brother!

I'm not aware of the old crown being removed. The commemorative £5 crown has been introduced but I think the 2 crowns still run side by side. Here's the royal mint information in legal tender: https://www.royalmint.com/aboutus/policies-and-guidelines/legal-tender-guidelines/

Just for comparison, here's another one up for auction at the coin cabinet: https://auctions.thecoincabinet.com/lots/view/4-3T4Q8B/1917-gold-sovereign-pcgs-ms62-1593646-agw02355-oz

It's not really the monarchs death that takes a coin out of circulation but the law i.e. the coinage act. The crown in your hand is still legal tender and worth 25p. I can't imagine you'll be wanting to spend it though 😀

A move in the right direction, it's about time eBay took responsibility for the items sold on its site. Let's hope it's a success and they expand the testing to other counterfeited goods. I sell legitimate computer software on eBay and my market competition makeup is about 90% counterfeit and 10% genuine.

I think you got it right first time. The calculation I've used for the cost of silver content at 17ppt (parts per thousand): Weight of full sovereign is 7.98g x .017 (17ppt) = 0.136g of silver Todays spot price is £0.54/g total cost of silver per sovereign is .54 x .136 = £0.073, say 7p. I don't know how you're arriving at 36p, are you calculating the copper content as silver too? Please correct me if I've got my maths wrong too 😀

You don't have to put .66g of silver into a sovereign to get a nice yellow gold, it can be much less. Take a look at the yellow gold £5 coin and it's alloy composition in the link: There's only 1.2% (12ppt) silver in this alloy, so a similar composition for a sovereign is 7.98g x 0.012 = 0.096g of silver. That's about 5p worth of silver per sovereign, the rest of the non gold content can be made up with copper. And you don't have to use so much silver:

The percentage of gold per coin should be 22ct (91.66%) but the £5 (93.3%) and £2 (94.3%) coins are well above that. After a quick calculation the £5 coin contains approximately £5.09 worth of gold and the £2 coin contains £2.05. That's a lot of excess gold for the Royal Mint to give away. I have most copies of the Royal Mint Coin Club Bulletin for the years 1985 to 1989 and then 1994 to 1997 which have the prices of coins sold at the time, unfortunately I don't have 2002. I've been considering scanning the copies I hold and making them freely available on TSF but I'm ignorant of copyright law and have held back listing them. Lovely photos too!

Nice article, well presented and very interesting. The first time I saw "ghosting" was on the Gillick head sovereigns and it's an appealing feature. I've noticed it more on higher grade coins, is it possible lustre enhances it? On the 1922 example above the obverse shows a halo effect around the kings head while on the reverse is a mirror image of his head. I wonder why we don't see a mirror image of George and the dragon showing in the obverse? Here's another clear example I found on the net: https://coinparade.co.uk/1962-gold-sovereign/