3D Megadoodoo posted:

hot cocoa on the couch posted:

lol

3D Megadoodoo posted:

Have some respect.

Turbinosamente posted:

Edit: Speaking of gold bullion what is the hot pattern these days? Most of the posting I saw was lusting over St. Gaudens and maybe the Maple Leaf. Has the Krugerrands popularity finally declined as the go to for gold stacking?

stealie72 posted:

3D Megadoodoo posted:

Just remembered a dude trying to sell Hilti washers on Facebook Marketplace as antique or vintage tokens.

super nailgun posted:

Found some fun tokens at a flea market today. Look at that chonker on the upper left one!

I'm a little surprised by how often I find tokens from American arcades in Germany.

Picayune posted:

Holy crap, a Showbiz Pizza token. I would love to know where that guy got that, because Showbiz Pizza got its lunch eaten by its identical rival Chuck E. Cheese in the early nineties and vanished without a trace. Until now.

Picayune posted:

Holy crap, a Showbiz Pizza token. I would love to know where that guy got that, because Showbiz Pizza got its lunch eaten by its identical rival Chuck E. Cheese in the early nineties and vanished without a trace. Until now.

Turbinosamente posted:

My theory is some G.I.'s kid brought it with him. Didn't we used to have an army base or two to keep an eye on the commies over the Berlin Wall back then? I'm just young enough to have missed the Cold War.

The phone token and the one on the far right is kinda neat, I've never gotten ones with the deeply recessed line through them here.

super nailgun posted:

I collect arcade and pinball machines so I branched out into tokens too... Finding the genuine 80s stuff is always cool. It's a shame big mixed lots on eBay are usually 95% car wash and casino tokens. I did pick up an actually solid mixed lot a couple years ago though, found lots of old CEC and Showbiz ones, but also a few Major Magic and Aladdin's Castle, along with a bunch of other local/regional arcades.

Picayune posted:

Holy crap, a Showbiz Pizza token. I would love to know where that guy got that, because Showbiz Pizza got its lunch eaten by its identical rival Chuck E. Cheese in the early nineties and vanished without a trace. Until now.

meat police posted:

On the record I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but gold & silver valuation has always seemed suspect. Naturally holding onto something you see value in will have a certain bias, but there's no way recent developments would only have a +$200 increase in gold after how many years?

Turbinosamente posted:

I try and stay away from speculating on why the prices of silver and gold are the way they are: mostly because a lot of woo types have been screaming about silver being artificially suppressed for years. It makes it very hard to figure out the legitimate points for that argument versus the stackers that want to get rich should silver go up to $50 or even $100 an ounce. Anyways I finally have mildly interesting thread content as I've finally checked out the local coin shop!


First I finally got me a flying eagle cent! And yes I only have a VG budget for this coin, and chose this grubbier looking one with the rim dent over the others because there was still detail in the tail feathers.

Turbinosamente posted:

And I got this random 1933 Moroccan 20 franc coin because I'm a sucker for pretty geometry and had been previously been eyeing up the 1 franc denomination on ebay but didn't buy it. I could argue that the center design is kinda flower like, and therefore counts in my self imposed rules for world currency collecting.

meat police posted:

I love the intricate designs this has

Armacham posted:

Laws against graven images have one weird upside

Sy Borg posted:

Flying Eagle cents are a personal favorite of mine, partially due to the fact they were minted for only three years. However, the biggest appeal for me is that it has a bird on the observe. American coins can be pretty boring from a design perspective (oh look, another side profile of a human head - how cool!). So the departure to show an animal in motion grabs my attention and is pretty refreshing.

Turbinosamente posted:

A thank you to the lovely Sy Borg! We did some trading and he kindly sent along this 1909 VBD penny, which now has an extra special spot in the new type album.



That's one childhood goal completed! Try as I might I never found one in change back then, even though I did find normal 1909 cents a couple times.

Sy Borg posted:

Over the past few months I've gotten lucky with some eBay auctions at great prices. One of them was a substantially completed Whitman book of Lincoln cents from 1909 through 1940 that included the 1909 VDB. Since it is better to share than horde, I'm so glad it arrived safely.

Turbinosamente posted:

My ebay luck has been so so lately.



There was room for one more page in the type set album, so I paid way too much for this old bicentennial page. But I was able to get the 40% silver clad version of the set for half the price! They were already cracked out of a mint set years ago before I got them so they aren't in prefect shape, but are good enough for the album. Now I don't have to worry about getting a good set of bicentennial coins ever again. Fun fact, I somehow didn't have an Ike dollar from this series before this which is what prompted the half assed search on ebay to begin with.



And I paid the market rate for this shield nickel, but I really liked the die cracks on the face. They look like branches coming out of the laurel leaves to me, almost makes them look purposeful. Apparently a ton of these nickels have die cracks partly because the mint wasn't used to striking such a hard metal yet (so they used a lot of force to compensate) and partly because there wasn't much of a budget to remake dies either so they used them until they were absolutely destroyed.

Turbinosamente posted:

For modern coins I do tend to like the reverses more, particularly the National Parks series in quarters and the shield reverse on pennies. Somewhere I read or heard somebody making GBS threads on the modern shield design which is weird to me as I loved it when it first came out and prefer it to the old static drawing of the Lincoln Memorial. Hell, I like the original proposal better for the Jefferson nickel as well instead of the straight on view of Monticello we got there.

super nailgun posted:

Nice! I love the Ike dollars, they're so comically huge. I got a few from my dad when I visited recently, a bicentennial (along with a bicentennial Kennedy half) and a 1972. The back side of the regular Ike dollars is so good, that lunar eagle design goes hard.

Shield nickel is cool as hell too, I don't think I've ever seen one of those in person but I'd love to get one. We'll see if it ever happens... I've avoided buying anything other than arcade tokens on eBay because I know if I just started buying whatever looked neat I'd end up with an impossibly huge collection much faster than I'd expect. Probably best to rate limit a bit by restraining myself to flea markets and finds in the wild.

Along with the Ikes and half, I also got a little bit more for the exonumia category that my dad had hung onto since my brother and I were kids. I don't recall ever having gone to the bowling alley on base so he must have picked that up later, but the other designs I definitely remember many passing through my hands as a youngster.



Absolutely agreed, especially on the shield penny. Some of the newer dollar variants are pretty killer too. I got one of the 2019 Polio Vaccine ones in change from a vending machine while I was visiting, first time I've seen one of the innovations series. Super neat design on the back and the Liberty variant on the face isn't bad either.

Hotel Kpro posted:

I seem to have inherited my great uncle's stamp collection. Doing a brief look through I couldn't find anything of extraordinary value so I'll probably give this away at the earliest convenience. He seemed to know people from all over the world judging by the countries he had

Turbinosamente posted:

I liked the lunar eagle before but I love it on this proof because of how the bright frosted moon contrasts with the mirror field of space. I have no idea if Ike proofs have the same effect going on ...

super nailgun posted:

Nice! I love the Ike dollars, they're so comically huge.

Turbinosamente posted:

Are they still attached to envelopes? I've always found first day covers and the like to be more interesting, but they take up so much drat space. I've got one with the original letter from a hotel in Europe explaining to the recipient that they looked, but could not find the alarm clock she had thought she lost by leaving it in her room there. My stamp collecting is definitely on hold, maybe for forever at this point, as it's so drat huge. As far as I can tell you weren't anybody if you didn't have a stamp collection in the 1960s so that's why there are so many collections out there getting inherited, mine included.

Turbinosamente posted:

Ikes are cool, I keep holding on to the duplicates I have even though I've put them in the spending change. And if you like the lunar eagle, get a proof coin, at least in a Susan B Anthony dollar.



Final silly question, what year is that Chuckie Cheese token? When deciding which one to keep in my collection I looked them up: apparently the ones from 1977/78 carry a premium as those are the first years of operation. I ultimately went with the one I have from my birth year, 1990, since I remember the 90s 'tude redesign Chuckie the most.

super nailgun posted:

The tokens are a 1990 (sign design) and a 1982 (rat design).

Mrenda posted:

I'm thinking about getting some stamps. Not for investment but purely because I like the art. I've been thinking about it for years because the Irish postal system releases some cool stuff. Basically it's a way of getting little miniature art that isn't so gawky as postcards. Thing is I have no idea how to store them? What kind of binder you put them in?

The Irish post has sheets of four, eight, sometimes indivual stamps, and first day covers. Which do I go for and how do I even store them? Surely stamps from all the various places come in vastly different sizes, etc. so no standard way of storing is going to work.

This talks about "mounting strips" but do you actually stick stuff down? https://www.anpost.com/Shop/Products/18SBKL

Googling this turns up results about humidity, etc. on the most horrific websites.

3D Megadoodoo posted:

Might I suggest a nicely-bound stockbook. They have a lot of flexibility.

Also available are stock pages for a binder. They sell them with variously-sized strips or pockets for basically any item, even oversized ones for larger sheets.

For storage in a less-pretty way, stock cards and a box are good.

E: also, everyone thinks "I don't need tweezers" but just get tweezers (a post office these days will probably even sell you suitable ones) and get used to handling your stuff only with them.

Turbinosamente posted:

Anybody get any cool coins lately? I took advantage of the high price of silver and dumped my duplicates for this nice old quarter:



My first capped liberty bust anything! Might make another comb through for any other coins to deaccession for more US type set stuff, but otherwise the slimming down of my collection is going fairly well still.