Reply to Thread

Message:: [QUOTE="daveydempsey, post: 77488, member: 22"]This TPG slabbing thing has become  quite a con game.It was designed to be a con game many years ago.On a world timescale the USA is relatively new in coin and paper money production.The majority of collectors in the rest of the world manages to grade numismatic material themselves. The plastic used by the slabbing companies is usually some kind of trade secret, but no doubt it's as stable and inert as their R&D departments can make it, and should do no harm to the coins for the short or medium term. But frankly, we simply don't know how any kind of plastic will behave in the long term - plastic hasn't been invented for long enough. They can do all the artificial ageing tests they like, but the only true test of how a material ages is to wait around for several centuries and see what actually happens. We know some plastics degrade very quickly, and destroy any metallic objects embedded in them as they degrade (the plasticized PVC you often find in cheap coin albums is an excellent example). We also know that plastics are not eternal, and slabs certainly will not last as long as the gold, silver and copper coins they are purporting to protect.[/QUOTE]