From the Graders Desk The past couple of weeks have been busy mainly with a single type of coin. Since the releases of the two coin West Point SIlver Eagle set and the Reverse Proof Buffalo have come and gone, those two items have slowed down. However, that hasnt prevented a large quantity of red, uncirculated wheat cents mostly from the 40s and early 50s to appear on my desk. Part of what keeps an otherwise daunting task interesting, in this case 5000+ wheat pennies spread across several invoices, is finding some of the surface oddities that occur when the mint is producing coins by the hundreds of millions and into the billions. This past week, I found such a thing on a mid 40s Wheat. What appears to be scrape marks going vertically are found on the reverse top half of the coin. At first, they could be dismissed as the coin being scraped alongside a flat surface, however a closer, magnified look reveals that these scrape marks are not dug into the coin, but rather raised from the coins surface. Further examination shows that the scrapes also go underneath or behind the lettering instead of over it which would be the case if the coin were scraped or damaged after being struck. This shows that it was not the coin that had been scraped either during or after production, but rather the die. Either the die had been clashed (the two dies stamping together without a planchet between them), or possibly some form of foreign substance had gotten on the die and struck into the die itself which necessitated repair work on the die. The mint worker who did the repair work may have been in a hurry or distracted as the gouges were made fairly deep into this particular die and the rest of the die was left alone. Instead of smoothing out the die before return to service, it was apparently placed back into use as soon as the offending issue was removed. These same die scrapes can be seen on Mercury Dimes from the same 1940s era. Lighter die scrapes may look like the coin had been polished or scraped in a small area due to the lack of luster frost compared to the rest of the coin. However heavier scraped dies will show under magnification at the correct angles to grading light that the areas are in fact raised from the surface of the coin. These die scrapes once identified for what they are generally do not have any effect on the grade of the coin, nor do they add any particular extra value to the coin. However, they do make for an interesting variation in the surface and in some cases, one that will stand out from a large quantity of like coins.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 16:29:20 +0000
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