Today I uploaded to my Youtube channel a video titled “Spotting Fake Morgan Silver Dollars”, and I thought that maybe it would be helpful to write an article going over some of the obvious details of one of the coins from the video. So today we’re going to look at the 1884-S Morgan that was featured in that video.
Now you may recall that the 1884-S is one of the Magnetic coins, so that is all she wrong right? While yes, that’s 100% true (if it’s magnetic, it’s definitely a fake!), I still thought we would look up close at some of the ugly details of this coin. You may find yourself in a situation without a magnet and scale on you, so it’s nice to know what to look you just by visual inspection.
From afar, this coin doesn’t really look all that bad, but there is more to the story here. I used the Coin-scope to take some up-close shots so you can see some of the things on this coin that make it stand out, even if you don’t have a scale or a magnet on you.
You can see in this close-up example where the metal spills over the edge in the mold… likely a weak spot in the mold that needed to be corrected before this pour.
In this picture, you can see where the arrow is pointing a large crevice… this is a huge sign, because there is no way for this to happen on real dollars… essentially the molten metal being poured into the mold had an air bubble in it, and the metal cooled around it.
Here you can see more pour cavities or crevices that isn’t going to occur on real coins. This is a phenomenon reserved entirely for molten metal being poured into a mold. The longer one to the right is likely a crack that occurred in the metal as it was cooling.
This one is easy… Silver doesn’t rust. This is clearly some sort of pot metal that has iron or steel in it. If you see rust on a coin, it’s likely a fake.
More rust spots… there are a ton of them. I didn’t feel the need to make an arrow for each one.
So there you have it guys… detailed and up-close pictures of the 1884-S in my video showing you things that you can physically look for on a coin if you don’t have any tools with you. Most of these can be seen by the naked eye!
