wear loss on coins

I am a journalist not a coin collector per se.

Picked up a 1933 Cuban One Peso piece at an estate sale
for $9.00 USD.

The coin .900 fine also indicated its weight at 26.7295 g.

When I weighed it on a vintage apothecary scale it showed
only 26.318 g. a loss of 400+ milligrams from wear, or
about 1.5%.

The coin is not uncirculated, or even fine, but it was an
interesting statistic to me about the wear of coins. I local
coin dealer confirmed that this is normal . . .

Photo of coin at: www.nyx.net/~wboas/coin.jpg

Bill

www.nyx.net/~wboas

Do keep in mind that some of the "weight loss" may not have been from
wear at all; there was a plus/minus tolerance range around the official
standard weight mandated by law. That's been a stumbling block against
efforts to numismatically grade coins by weight.

In article Pine.SUN.3.96.1061021141957.19197A-100000@nyx,
wrote:

I am a journalist not a coin collector per se.

Picked up a 1933 Cuban One Peso piece at an estate sale
for $9.00 USD.

The coin .900 fine also indicated its weight at 26.7295 g.

When I weighed it on a vintage apothecary scale it showed
only 26.318 g. a loss of 400+ milligrams from wear, or
about 1.5%.

The coin is not uncirculated, or even fine, but it was an
interesting statistic to me about the wear of coins. I local
coin dealer confirmed that this is normal . . .

Photo of coin at: www.nyx.net/~wboas/coin.jpg

Bill

www.nyx.net/~wboas

In article , Slime Lowlife
wrote:

Do keep in mind that some of the "weight loss" may not have been from
wear at all; there was a plus/minus tolerance range around the official
standard weight mandated by law. That's been a stumbling block against
efforts to numismatically grade coins by weight.

Found a reference to the legal weight tolerances of silver coins of the
US. The Cuban peso was on par with the US dollar during this period, &
the coins were struck at the US mint as well, so I assume that similar
tolerances applied to both Cuban & Yanqui coins.

The link to the information I got was at
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=002...613%3AAITNCI%3
E2.0.CO%3B2-8

Sorry for the messy URL.

The long & short of it was that all silver coins had a weight tolerance
of 1.5 grains. Translated into grams, this comes to 0.097. So it
would appear that the weight shortage is not accounted for by a
low-weight but still-legal issue.

In article Pine.SUN.3.96.1061021141957.19197A-100000@nyx,
wrote:

I am a journalist not a coin collector per se.

Picked up a 1933 Cuban One Peso piece at an estate sale
for $9.00 USD.

The coin .900 fine also indicated its weight at 26.7295 g.

When I weighed it on a vintage apothecary scale it showed
only 26.318 g. a loss of 400+ milligrams from wear, or
about 1.5%.

The coin is not uncirculated, or even fine, but it was an
interesting statistic to me about the wear of coins. I local
coin dealer confirmed that this is normal . . .

Photo of coin at: www.nyx.net/~wboas/coin.jpg

Bill

www.nyx.net/~wboas