That 1964 quarter rings a little dull.
Flea market, loose change tray, two euros for the lot. It looks right and it sounds wrong. Put it on the bench and find out why — before you decide what it is worth.
Two instruments, one coin, one honest answer
Lay the piece flat on the glass and close the caliper jaws onto the edge. Then put it on the kitchen scale and turn the reeded wheel until the figures agree. The brass beam leans toward whichever side is heavier, and the green band shows how far a coin may drift and still be right.
Caliper
Slide the jaws closed. When they bite, the reading on the beam is your diameter.
Close the jaws until they touch the edge of the coin.
Balance
First tell the bench what you believe it is, and what shape it is in — a worn coin has lost metal, so it is allowed to come up light.
Turn the wheel until it matches your scale.
Nothing borrowed, nothing taken on faith
Every type in the bench is one you wrote down yourself: the mass, the diameter, the tolerance, the edge — and where the numbers came from. A mint's own publication, or your own careful measuring of a few clean pieces. When a figure is challenged later, you can say exactly who stands behind it, which is more than most catalogues manage.
Watch the detail leave, step by step
Wear arrives in an order, and the order is always the same: the fine hair lines go first, the rays flatten next, the legend softens, and finally the rim melts into the letters. Drag the handle and take the coin down through its life.
MS-65
Uncirculated
Never spent. Every hair line present, the rays sharp to their tips, mint lustre unbroken across the fields.
Still undecided with the coin in your hand? Seven yes-or-no questions — is the lettering complete, does the rim run unbroken, can you still read the date — and you land on a grade without pretending to an eye you have not built yet.
The collection as a map
Every issuer becomes a small token set down where it belongs on the globe: bright brass once it is in a tray, outlined while you are hunting it, blank until its turn comes. Rings count your progress across each continent, and coins struck by states that no longer exist keep a shelf of their own.
What you are after, and what you will pay
- 1909-S VDB CentTarget grade · VG-8 or better ceiling 700
- 2 anna, 1841Target grade · F-12 ceiling 45
- 5 kopecks, 1924Target grade · VF-20 ceiling 30
Find one on a table at the weekend and a single tap carries it out of the list and into a holder, grade and all.
An inventory of what you own, kept where you own it
Nothing is gathered and nothing is sent anywhere. There is no account, no shared gallery, no price service and no server standing behind this app. A coin cabinet is a list of valuable things and where they live, which is precisely the sort of list that should never be sitting on somebody else's machine. Yours does not.
You are never signed up
The drawer opens straight away. No registration, no password, no profile. Your name, your email address, your age and your whereabouts are never requested, and device or advertising identifiers go unread.
Where the cabinet is kept
Coins, photographs of both faces, grades, measurements, reference entries, trays, the atlas, the wants list and the ceilings you set are all written into the app's own storage on your device.
No copy of your holdings exists anywhere else. Nobody at this end knows what is in your trays, what it might be worth, or that you own a single coin at all.
The valuations you write down
A maximum price against a wanted coin says something about your means as well as your taste. Those figures are notes to yourself: they are never checked against a market, never quoted to a dealer, and never leave the handset.
Your reference book stays yours
Weights, diameters, tolerances and edges are the ones you entered, from the sources you chose. The app does not fetch a catalogue, does not check a figure against an online database and does not quietly replace what you wrote with somebody else's number. Nothing arrives from outside, which is the same reason nothing departs.
Caliper and balance
The caliper reads from the screen you placed the coin on, and the weight is the figure you dial in from your own scale. No instrument is paired, no Bluetooth or local network is used, and no measurement is submitted anywhere to be checked. Both tools work in a cellar with no reception, which is often exactly where the tin of old coins turns up.
The atlas is drawn from your entries
Tokens land on the map according to the issuers you recorded, not according to you. Location services are not used, your position is never read, and the globe says where your coins were struck rather than where their owner happens to be standing.
Photographs of the two faces
Images come in through the camera you point yourself or the standard iOS picker, so only the pictures you hand over are ever seen by the app. They are pinned inside the holder and go no further.
Showing a coin to somebody
Exporting a holder or a list hands the file to iOS's share sheet at the moment you ask. Be deliberate about it: an export can describe valuable property in some detail, and once it has gone it lives under the rules of whatever received it and in the hands of whoever you sent it to.
Nothing borrowed, in the code either
No analytics package, advertising network, crash reporter or tracking beacon has been built in. Nothing counts your openings and nobody is waiting at the far end, because there is no far end.
Younger collectors
Plenty of collections begin with a grandparent's tin and a child of nine. Since nothing leaves any device, nothing leaves theirs, and no record exists on our side for COPPA, the UK Children's code or comparable rules elsewhere to reach.
Emptying the drawer
Any coin, type or list can be rewritten or thrown out inside the app whenever you like, and nothing is removed behind your back. Deleting Reedtech Bench takes the entire cabinet with it for good, and there is nothing held here to restore from.
Worth keeping in mind: with iCloud or computer backups switched on, your cabinet may sit inside that encrypted backup, which belongs to you and falls under Apple's terms rather than this page.
If this page stops being accurate
Should a later version behave in a way not described above, this page is corrected before that version reaches the store, and the date at the top moves with it.
Questions
Put them to dcuprasov2@gmail.com.
One bench, one correspondent
A fault, an edge type the app cannot describe, a grading step you would argue with, or a piece that turned out to be something other than what the seller believed. It all arrives in the same place.
- Developer
- Blair Ellington
- dcuprasov2@gmail.com
- Reply
- One to two days