Something pressed into it, it's not a lamination. Were it, the copper core would be showing. Interesting defect taking out part of Y and reappearing some left of R.
It doesn't look like material (coin bags) weave. Perhaps some one put their hankie edge or necktie between the die and planchett.
The depth of this, I'd think, is suggestive it's more than cloth. Whatever it is, it took a bite out of this coin, and even flattened down the collar some. I'll wager a Mint worker would know. But no rag or tie is going to impress a planchet like this. That divot on the side of the head is also illustrative. Debris of some kind got sandwiched into this thing. Why don't you send it off to the CONECA forum? That's what I think I'd do.
Sorry , poor humor ! I do remember a photo of them wearing something similar to short heavy work aprons on the press floor, but that was decades ago. I just did not think that happened by itself, but needed human help. IMO, Jim
Yeah, I imagine it has to be some sort of fabric the press operators keep on hand for wiping grease & grime off of the tooling, or a rag left behind by the die setter.
That's no bite at all, @eddiespin. The cloth merely displaced planchet metal. Consider that cloth is a solid, while grease is only a semi-solid, yet grease successfully displaces planchet metal as well. This is because when cloth, grease, wood, etc gets trapped in the coining chamber it cannot escape from between the dies. The weight of the planchet is no different than its brethren so, aside from the obvious defect, the struck coin must also differ slightly from normally struck coins in other areas because the metal where the obstruction was had to flow elsewhere. The differences would be some combination of sharper reeding, sharper design details, less rounded rims, or perhaps even an imperceptibly thicker coin (if a hydraulic press). Most noticeable to me on the subject coin is a bit of finning of the rim.
OK, I'll need to see that. Grease fills devices, I'm familiar with that. However, unless I'm missing something, I don't recall any examples of it displacing planchet metal. Might this be it, you're saying those affected areas are smooth? They look like bites into the coin to me. Not trying to be a PITA, I'm trying to understand.
Think of the grease filled dies again . . . if those recessed are filled, where exactly does the metal go that was intended to fill those recesses. The grease actually exerts a force on the metal, and causes it to flow elsewhere. All materials possess a characteristic known as bulk modulus. It is the relative bulk modulus and the volume of two materials which determines how much each compresses to accommodate the other when the available volume is insufficient to accommodate both in uncompressed form. Since the rag is compressible only to a point, it is forced into the planchet, and the planchet metal in that area must take the path of least resistance to another destination. Lintmarks, occasionally seen in the fields of proof coins are another fine example of this.
So to cut to the chase the striking pressure was so great the rag or whatever couldn't compress anymore and drove into the annealed planchet? I looked up "bulk modulus" and am trying to visualize this.
Sort of . . . both the rag and the planchet can compress even more under even greater striking pressure, but they both share the burden in proportion to their volume and their bulk modulus. If you want an easier way of relating to bulk modulus, think of it as volumetric stiffness.
I would think the cloth ( plant material) with it's high organic bonding content would have been ejected by the metal bonds that are stronger. I am sure glad they stopped making underwear out of that cloth. I guess Superman got his cape caught flying through the mint. It's always good to learn. Jim
A fancy way of saying metal is harder than cloth? But yeah, that's why I'm still not conceptualizing it. I'd be inclined to think the atoms and molecules would be inclined to disperse laterally rather than vertically dig into the metal. And if you look at the shape of this error, it's well-defined. It just doesn't appear like cloth formed it, not the way it's cut off and then angled back, at 135-some degrees. I'm thinking maybe I got this baby wrong, now, maybe it is a lamination. The surface looks exactly like one. The copper isn't showing, but then maybe it's not bit in to that depth to expose the core. Think I talked myself into it, going with lamination error now.
Without spending more time trying to convince you that this is a strike-thru, I'll simply state that, given the thickness of the missing material, a delam would most assuredly deliver a view of the copper core.