Coppers and Stuff

On Saturday Merc and I hit a hole that produced many coins the past few weeks. We were checking to see if it was a dead hole.....it was :-\ I pulled a thimble, a few buttons, and two more musket balls. I must have dug 20 musket balls at this site.
After four hours beating the dead hole >:tongue: we stopped at another place where we had to fight power lines. >:{
After six hours total I finally dug a coin. :cheesysmile: A very off center Connecticut copper.
Sunday my family scattered to the four winds so I got out for another hour and dug a first year Matron. Thanks and HH
Edit -went back today, Monday, for an hour and pulled a dandy and a KG |:cheering:

Very nice Drew, some old coppers and relics. Thats a lot of musket balls to dig and congrats on the 1st year Matron head. How did you beat the power lines?

:wow: Hey Drew , Nice going !!! A CT Copper, that's great. I hope you didn't clean it yet ? It looks like it could be a nice one, I would be careful with it. the most I would do at this point is let it soak in Dishwashing soap and water just to remove the top surface dirt until you can get a Variety on it. Do you know what year it is at least. Hopefully not a 1787 ( 241 varieties).
I would ask Dan with some help on this one. Seems like the more caked-up it is the better the chance of getting some nice detail. i'd like to see it cleaned up a bit. just enough to Id at least.
As far as the Matron head, I'm glad you finally got that one under your belt. I wouldn't worry about the Quality too much. They all, at least the ones I've found seem to all be about the same grade. it must be the Copper they used on those. I have a 1816 and 1819 and both look like that.
Congrats !!

Great job on two more coppers Drew. The CT copper still eludes me. My fatty Indian head isn't worth posting its nearly toast. :congrats:

Al, we really didn't beat the power lines....we had to move away. :dontknow:

Sal, yeah...my CT coppers are all ugly :blackeye: and I don't clean them much. It sounded like I was saying it was my first Matron but I meant it was an 1816 (first year Matron). I have about 10 or 15 Matrons on the year. :waving:

Merc, odd the fatty was toast as the other coins there were pretty good. Funny how you found that in the first 10 min, then we hunt for 6 hrs, then I get a coin in the last 10 min.

congrats Drew , looks like a decent coin too. i can't see enough detail on the back to get a variety for you :dontknow:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by del link=topic=11328.msg123162#msg123162 date=1347919608

congrats Drew , looks like a decent coin too. i can't see enough detail on the back to get a variety for you :dontknow:

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Thanks Dan...
It is wicked off center....does that mean anything?

no , it could of just slipped from the center of the press die or wasn't properly aligned to begin with . a lot of them are off struck or even double struck.

Very nice! :congrats:

Looks like a nice day of relic hunting! congrats on your finds

very nice! |:cheering:

Congrats on the coppers and a nice hunt, WTG |:cheering:

I think any large copper is a nice copper :yes:

Even though you spent some long hard hours of digging to finally get what you were searching for, you still got have that great feeling of accomplishment...or at least I do when It happenes for me

Hey Drew, I read a great story in my Error coin book about the whole Coin making process with the COIN PRESS method. It says that often when they didn't use Oxen or horses to move the T-Handle that it took at least 5 people to make coins. A young boy would sit in a pit making the coins while 4 others would rock the T bar back and forth. They didn't use collars to hold the coin from what I can tell and often a boy would lose a finger if he wasn't careful. He had to be short so he wouldn't hit his head on the cross bar above as he went back and forth retreiving more Planchets and dropping off the coins that were made. I'll have to post the Picture of the whole operation. It's pretty cool. You have to remember, they didn't waste anything back then so it it came out off center than it was still used. Actually, some people will pay more for it like that. Afterall, it is a Error Coin.
Congrats Again!

Thanks everyone. Sal, you've inspired me to research the older coin making processes.

This was a few years ago Don when my cleaning skills were even worse than they are now :lol: Picture taking skills are the same :lol:

Here's the scoop. On Connecticut coppers one of the fastest ways to narrow down the variety is by the legends and punctuation. Once you narrow it down, the location of liberty's branch hand on the reverse, where it points and where the branch points are the next thing you go to. I narrowed down your piece to a couple of varieties I thought it would be. What made your piece a bit easier was having INDE ET at the left of liberty. Normally it is INDE at left and ETLIB at right. I happened to have one of these in my own collection. I scanned mine in and then started matching things up. I don't have good digital editing software, but I do, as many others do also, have Microsoft Publisher. I opened a file and inserted both photos and then resized the smaller to match the larger. I had downloaded your photo to my computer and rotated it slightly so it faced straight up and down. Here's the thing that some software programs have, but you can work around it a bit with Publisher. When you drag a photo around it becomes semi transparent as long as you're holding down the mouse button and don't release it. I dragged your coin on top of mine and matched up key points to verify it was the variety I thought. What you have is a 1788 M.16.4-L.2. It's a rarer variety with about 25-35 known. It's an interesting reverse die and in later use with a different obverse it develops a huge triangular die break. Hope this all helps. Here's the photos I used.

Attachment 37250 Attachment 37251

Man I love the big old coppers, and those are nice ones to find. Congratulations.

Its a hard one with the amount of detail left on it Don if I had to have guessed I probably would of said the M15.1-L.1

You could be right Del. This one is about as hard as it gets as it's hard to tell sometimes what's crud and what's detail. Unfortunately one of the ways to tell the difference is the period after AUCTORI on the obverse and that part is impossible to see from the pics. If there was detail in that area it would have made it a breeze. Who knows, maybe it's a new reverse die....L.3. That would be nice.