Whizzing

On Sun, 30 Sep 2007 15:58:44 -0500, "Mr. Jaggers"
lugburzman[at]yahoo[dot]com wrote:

No one has yet brought up the topic of what is commonly called metal
"chasing," a technique by which metal is moved around with various hand
tools to form new letters and numerals. Among coppers, many fake 1799 large
cents, the "1815" large cents, as well as the famous "altered reverse" large
cents, are the result of the use of this technique. I will defer to others
to determine if it has any kinship with whizzing.

This actually is another interesting phenomenon, though different from
whizzing. I actually picked up recently a 1914-D Lincoln cent that had
been tooled from a 1944-D Lincoln cent, to study the process, which I
know has happened with the coin types you mention as well as many
others. I'm most familiar with the process with ancient coins, an area
I've been most involved with lately, with scammers sometimes tooling
coins to improve their apparent grade and other times to change them
from a common to rare variety or type. I hadn't heard before the term
"metal chasing." Interesting. A very quick Google search indicates it
has legitimate metallurgical functions as well.

Anyway, this tooled Lincoln cent is part of a cent set I'm building
that goes back before cents to coins that directly preceded and most
influenced it, to ancient times -- U.S. cent - British penny -
French denier - Roman denarius - Greek drachm. I won't be able to
include every type (no Chain cent for me), but it'll be
representative. Mostly authentic official undamaged coins (sometimes
different varieties of the same type/year) along with official damaged
coins (holed, broken, corroded), official imitatives (sometimes called
restitution issues), barbarous imitatives, contemporary forgeries, old
"name" counterfeits, recent counterfeits, tooled pieces, modern marked
replicas, modern unmarked replicas, and so on. Variety is the spice of
collecting. g

--

Email: (delete "remove this")

Consumer: http://rg.ancients.info/guide
Connoisseur: http://rg.ancients.info/glom
Counterfeit: http://rg.ancients.info/bogos