I stumbled across a coin I forgot about in my collection that I found some 20 years ago. 1936 Lincoln Wheat. What is this mark below the "9"? I didn't have anything to take a good digital picture close up until now. What are your thoughts?
I think it's a deep gouge that moved a lot of metal. You can seen that the scratch then continues above the 9 and across the rest of the visible field. Same thing happened to the 6.
I also think the 9 took a hit that displaced some copper. Se off you can stick a thin piece of paper underneath that area in question.
I can't tell from the picture if it is just dirt, or there is a gouge in front of that piece of metal.
Since we are looking at 1936 pennies, would it be safe to say this was a broken 9 during the minting process?
My hunch is that there is a gouge there, it's just packed with crud. If it was on the die, there would be others like it, so I suppose you could search auction images. With a mintage of 309,637,569 there were probably at least 300 obverse dies used though, so you might have to look at a thousand coins before finding another one. It's not from the tip of the 9 - not much if anything is missing there, although the tip appears to be bent downward slightly.
