A coin I found outside

[Big Frank]

I think it was a couple months ago when I found a coin in the driveway, just on the neighbor's side of the line. It was so dirty and grungy looking, I thought it was a penny and stuck it in my pocket. It was actually a 1918-D Mercury dime, minted the year my dad was born. I may have mentioned this before. Cleaning them ruins the value of old coins, but I cleaned it up anyway. It's badly worn, but looks even worse in the pictures than IRL. These dimes are 90% silver and 10% copper. Even if it doesn't have any collector value, it's still worth ~$3.50 because of the silver in it. They were minted from 1916–1945. The second pic, from Wikipedia, is what a really good one looks like.

The third pic is a 2016 gold commemorative version made of 0.10 troy oz. of  0.9999 fine (99.99% pure) 24K gold, to celebrate 100 years since the Mercury dime came out. The Mint released a centennial version in gold of the Mercury dime on April 21, 2016, sold through the Mint's official website. Demand was so high that orders were no longer able to be placed within 45 minutes of the coin becoming available. They were a special strike and most coins were in SP-70 (Specimen) perfect condition. Specimen and Proof Like (PL) coins are better than regular Mint State (MS) coins, but not as good as Proof (PF) coins. They sounded like a great investment to me, so I bought 2 of them. Unfortunately I lost money on them when I sold them. I paid $440 apiece, + $10 shipping, and think I sold them for $329 or $349 each. I guess that's what happens when the majority of them are the same exact grade. They really aren't that rare. But, since I made over $1,000 on a $25 Gold Eagle I sold, I didn't feel too bad about it. You win some, you lose some.

I have a 1929 Mercury dime too. It must be the one I pried out of the floor duct in my upstairs bathroom several years ago. I used a letter opener made from a knife, or an actual knife to dig it loose. It's scratched up around the letter "I" in LIBERTY, but still in much better shape than the one I found in the driveway. I'll take a couple of pics of it and post them later. I'm tired and finally going back to bed around 4 p.m.

P.S. Designer Adolph Alexander Weinman's WA mark is on the front of the original dimes and the gold commemorative, but just looks like a "W" on this old dime of mine.

[Pathfinder]

The first dime is what we call junk silver, valuable for its silver content only. I may be wrong, but numismatically I don't think it has any real value due to its wear. Maybe its age too, not sure. Great find, though.

[Big Frank]

Yeah, I think it's junk too. Here's the 96 year old dime that I dug out of the heating vent. My best guess is that it's worth $7.50-$15, but I'm not a very good judge of condition. Besides this, I have a couple of one ounce silver rounds. They're worth about $48.50. I'll post pics as soon as I edit them.

[Big Frank]

Here's a Knife Collector's silver round I bought several years ago. It's .999 pure silver, "3 nines fine", and weighs one troy ounce. It's worth about 50 bucks, but I probably paid less than 25 for it, way back when.

And something that looks like a silver dollar issued by the Banff Springs Hotel during their centennial. It's in Banff, Alberta, Canada. The entire town, including the hotel, is situated in Banff National Park, a national park managed by Parks Canada. At an elevation of 1,414 metres (4,640 ft) above sea level, the hotel overlooks a valley towards Mount Rundle, both of which are situated within the Rocky Mountain mountain range. My mom and dad visited when they went to Alaska, and my mom gave me this as a souvenir. It says, "Banff Lake Louise Value $1.00 Expires Nov. 30, 1988." It was worth a dollar, but only then and there, like a poker chip, or token at a casino.

Opened in 1888 by the Canadian Pacific Railway, it is one of the earliest of Canada's grand railway hotels. The original five-storey wooden hotel was designed by Bruce Price and was able to accommodate 280 guests. With expansions, the original structure became the North Wing, which was eventually destroyed by fire in April 1926.

Lake Louise (named Ho-run-num-nay (Lake of the Little Fishes) by the Stoney Nakoda First Nations people) is a glacial lake within Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada. Situated 11 km (6.8 mi) east of the border with British Columbia, Lake Louise is located 5 km (3.1 mi) west of the community of Lake Louise and the Trans-Canada Highway (Highway 1).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banff_Springs_Hotel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Louise_(Alberta)

[Big Frank]

When I hired in at GM, it was the 50th year of the UAW. I can't remember if the union gave us a coin for free, or if I bought one. I think they gave everyone a coin, but I would have to check with my friends to see if they got one. Either way, it 99.9% pure silver and probably weighs a troy ounce. It came in a nice, blue velvet jewelry box that was fitted to the coin. The last pic is of it setting on the box but the flash on my cell phone camera didn't come on when it should have. It's still good enough to see it.

BTW, sterling silver is only 92.5% silver and 7.5% other metals, usually copper. Sterling silver jewelry is often marked 925 to denote that it's 925/1000 silver. Fine silver, which is 99.9% pure silver, is relatively soft, so silver is usually alloyed with copper to increase its hardness and strength. Sterling silver is prone to tarnishing, and elements other than copper can be used in alloys to reduce tarnishing, as well as casting porosity and firescale. Such elements include germanium, zinc, platinum, silicon, and boron. Recent examples of these alloys include argentium, sterlium and silvadium.

[Sponsor]

[Big Frank]

My favorite found coin is this Norway 1 Krone from 1950. I found it in a shallow puddle on the street when I was riding my bike on the other side of town about 50 years ago. Here's a better picture on a Norway 1 Krone from 1940 courtesy of Wikipedia. One the front is says Haakon den Syvende Norges Konge, meaning Haakon the Seventh King of Norway. On the back it says Alt for Norge, meaning Everything for Norway. The krone was introduced in 1875, and the hole in the center was common on some older coins around the world. People who couldn't afford fancy clothes with pockets, or a purse, could string their coins together and hang them around their neck like a necklace. These were made of a cupro-nickel alloy like a lot of U.S. coins that aren't silver or gold.

The krone, plural kroner, is the currency of the Kingdom of Norway (including overseas territories and dependencies). It was traditionally known as the Norwegian crown in English; however, this has fallen out of common usage. It is nominally subdivided into 100 øre, although the last coins denominated in øre were withdrawn in 2012.

The krone was the thirteenth-most-traded currency in the world by value in April 2010, down three positions from 2007. It is considered to be one of the world's G10 currencies, a group of the most traded currencies in the world.

The Norwegian krone is also informally accepted in many shops in Sweden and Finland that are close to the Norwegian border, and also in some shops in the Danish ferry ports of Hirtshals and Frederikshavn. Norwegians spent 14.1 billion NOK on border shopping in 2015 compared to 10.5 billion NOK spent in 2010. Border shopping is a fairly common practice amongst Norwegians, though it is seldom done on impulse. Money is spent mainly on food articles, alcohol, and tobacco, in that order, usually in bulk or large quantities. This is due to considerably higher taxes and fees on tobacco and alcohol purchased domestically in Norway.

Haakon VII; born Prince Carl of Denmark; 3 August 1872 – 21 September 1957) was King of Norway from 1905 until his death in 1957. Having reigned for nearly 52 years, he was the second longest-reigning monarch in Norwegian history, after Christian IV.

He was born in Copenhagen during the reign of his grandfather, King Christian IX of Denmark; he was named Carl at birth and was the second son of the Crown Prince and Crown Princess of Denmark (later King Frederick VIII and Queen Louise). Carl was educated at the Royal Danish Naval Academy and served in the Royal Danish Navy. After the 1905 dissolution of the union between Sweden and Norway, he was offered the Norwegian crown. Following a monarchy referendum, he accepted the offer and was formally elected King of Norway by the Storting and took the Old Norse name Haakon, thus ascended the throne as Haakon VII, becoming the first independent Norwegian monarch since Olav IV in 1387.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_krone#

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haakon_VII

[Big Frank]

Another foreign coin I have is 1 Pfennig from Deutschland. Here's a pic of mine, from 1979, the year I joined the army, and a picture of one from 1950. The Pfennig replaced the denarius, in the so-called Carolingian coin standard that Charlemagne established in the Middle Ages.

The pfennig or penny is a former German coin or note, which was an official currency from the 9th century until the introduction of the euro in 2002. While a valuable coin during the Middle Ages, it lost its value through the years and was the minor coin of the Mark currencies in the German Reich, West Germany and East Germany, and the reunified Germany until the introduction of the euro. Pfennig was also the name of the subunit of the Danzig mark (1922–1923) and the Danzig gulden (1923–1939) in the Free City of Danzig (modern Gdańsk, Poland).

The word Pfennig is etymologically related to the English penny, the Swedish penning, which was also model for the Finnish penni (1860–2001), the Estonian penn (1918–1927), the Polish fenig (1917–1918), the Lithuanian word for money pinigai and the pfenig (fening) of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1998–today). The /pf/ rather than /p/ in both pronunciation and spelling is a result of the High German consonant shift or second Germanic sound shift which affected the High German dialects of what is now southern Germany, Switzerland and Austria. High German (and to some extent Central German) dialects form the basis for modern Standard German.

Me and some of the other guys carried one of these in our wallets for luck when we were stationed in Germany. I carried it with me at all times, and as long as I had ein pfennig, I wasn't completely broke. I was worth about 4/10 of a cent, but it was still money. And since it  wasn't enough to buy anything on its own, it never got spent.

The last West German one- and two-pfennig coins were steel with a copper coating. The five- and ten-pfennig coins were steel with a brass coating. All four coins had their value imprinted on the obverse and an oak tree on the reverse.

The coins of the East German mark were made of aluminum, except for the 20 pfennig coin, which was made of an aluminum copper alloy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfennig#