1859S Half Dollar Grade my Coin opinion

[Earle42]

You cannot rely upon what goes onto a slab like it is gospel truth.
As an example in this same vein, Daniel had a beautiful Walker he sold me that he had come back as cleaned. Neither Daniel nor myself could find anything on this coin that points to it being cleaned, and while Daniel who lives, eats breathes, and sleeps coins for a living has a lot more experience than I do, typically after almost 50 years I don't have a problem telling a cleaned coin in hand.

Someone dealing with tons of slabs, like Daniel, can tell you this type of thing happens more often than people WANT to know when it comes to the grading companies. A lot of people have a lot of money invested in slabs, and so its human nature for them not to want to hear about any fault with the companies.

BTW - I see Paul also chimed in on this one. I would take his word and Daniels anytime over a grading company. Grading companies have to, by design, use different graders with different personal experience levels (just natural to do so when hiring/training people). Therefore some degree of consistency has to occur. They do their best to limit inconsistency using two graders per coin (usually), but its there.

[monsterbug1]

I don't think its cleaned either; you might want to regrade/send to anacs

[Paul]

PCGS gave it an UNC details grade as cleaned. I really didn’t see anything that would have led me to believe it was cleaned. Oh well.

The absence of any surface accumulations whatsoever

[Below74]

Appears cleaned. Take notice to the difference in the field coloring between the head and cap compared to the open field on the right. The stars on the right side have halos which is also an indication. Compare the fields around the stars. The left looks good compared to the right side stars. The reverse doesn’t appear to have been disturbed in any ways.. Stunning coin! Enjoy