Slabbing

We get more questions about slabbing than almost anything else. I am not a huge fan of the US grading system, not least because it doesn’t make a lot of sense. A coin graded “Good” is a pretty poor grade, “Very Good” is anything but; and having 11 grades of uncirculated doesn’t make a lot of sense to me either.

I recognise my prejudice is, in part, due to my having spent umpteen decades immersed in the UK system, and maybe if you have grown up with the US system, the English will seem a bit weird and illogical. My pet hate is people who use both and refer to a coin as being “Fair to Good”. I must admit I do not know what that means in English, and lest you missed, it we are in England!

The US system is based on the Sheldon scale. The system starts at 0 and has a highest number of 70. There are many equivalence charts out there, none of them, in my opinion, very accurate. I drew up my own some while ago, and list it below. I hope it might be helpful to you.

To be clear, this is just my opinion: others will, and do, disagree with me and that’s fine, there is no absolute truth in this. I have though seen thousands of slabs over the years, and we list 100’s, so I like to think my opinion is a fairly worthwhile one, but I am under no illusions, there is no objective truth here.

One other point. A number can never truly tell the full story of a coin. Ultimately it becomes a summary. The look of it, the colour of it, the feel of it, the weight of it are really important factors in how you summarise a coin; one 53, can be an awful lot nicer than another. Here is my equivalence table:

The R. Ingram coins UK v US equivalence scale:

0 Below Poor

1-2 Poor

3-6 Fair

7-8 Fair-Fine

10-11 NF

12-15 Fine

20-30 Fine-Very Fine

35-40 VF

45-50 VF-EF

53-60 EF

61-62 EF-UNC

63-64 AU

65-66 UNC

67-68 BU

69-70 Choice BU

If you have a thought on this, do let us know.