(I posted this to another forum earlier, so some of you may have seen this elsewhere). I have a holed 1926-S Peace dollar that has something odd about the reeding - it appears to be slightly angled. I have no reason to suspect the thing is fake - it passes muster on all the usual tests and details are good. On this pic below, the coin in question is in the middle, sandwiched between a 40% Ike and an 1884 Morgan. The angle of the reeding is slight, but does go all the way around the coin. Assuming the coin is legit, what might be the reason for this? (sorry for crappy pictures - I was using my equally crappy phone)
I dont have an answer 4 the angled reeding. Do you mean, instead of the reeds running straight acrossed square, they are angled or tilted slightly. The photos are kinda blurry and i cant really see it. One thing i did notice, i dont like the looks of the 2 in the date. Idk if its just the photo making it look this way but the top curl of the 2 looks off.
Could also be that your coin was encased in a bezel with no loop. That can disfigure the edge. Then holed to place a loop to put on a chain.
Well, i was also referring to the hole in the middle of the top curl. It looks too skinny but as previously mentioned could be the blurry photos, the angle it was shot, and the fact i hafta lay on my side to see it upright Its probably legit though, i see no reason to c/f a '26s peace in THIS condition
One, that wouldn't cause an even tilting of the reeding all the way around the coin. Two, when the reverse die pushed the coin STRAIGHT up out of the collar, the tilted reeds would have all gotten mangled.
I would bet the coin was set in some form of bezel for jewelry and holed for a chain. I think Paddyman98 is spot on on his opinion
An "even tilting", as in equal tilted angle, all the way around ? No, it wouldn't, but it would be slightly angled all the way around, slightly increasing from low point to high point in each direction. No, but I will grant you that the coin being pushed out of the collar did have an effect. If the collar is tilted slightly, then part of the bottom edge of the planchet is not within the collar when the coin is struck, resulting in a partially flat edge. But when the coin is pushed out of the collar, the part of the edge that was not within the collar if forced through the reeded collar, thus cutting the reeds into that part of the edge, and in alignment with what was formed by the strike. Picture what would happen Michael. You have 2 objects (the dies) with a face planes that are parallel to each other. The 3rd object, the reeded collar, is tilted slightly, not in the same plane. The collar has a high side and a low side. On the low side the reeding is fully formed at strike, but slightly angled. But on the high side, the reeding is only formed on the top half of the edge of the coin, because the bottom half of the edge of the coin is out of the collar. Now the dies separate, and the rev die pushes the coin straight up, just like you said. But because part of the edge was not within the collar at strike, that part of the edge is now slightly wider than the opening in the collar. And because part of the edge is already in the collar, the wider part that is not is then forced through, and held in alignment by the reeding on the top half, and literally cutting the rest of the reeding on the bottom half of the edge. You see, the reeding on the unreeded portion can't be mangled by the coin being pushed out of the collar because the reeding isn't even there yet to be mangled. It is only formed by the coin being pushed out of the collar. And the rest of the reeding on the coin isn't mangled either because it's in alignment with the reeding of the collar. So it's just pushed out as it normally is. The bottom line of it all is that the only way the reeding can be angled is if the collar is tilted slightly. For if the collar is straight then the reeding will be straight. Now if you still want to disagree with this, OK. But tell me then, how IS the reeding angled ? And no, don't try and tell me that it was done by a bezel because there is no way that bezel being closed around a coin can exert enough force to angle the reeding like that. And besides that, the inside edges of bezels are smooth, not reeded, so even if a bezel is closed by a machine, the smooth edge of the inside of the bezel can't angle the reeding either.
Any illusion of the reeds being slanted is simply that -- an illusion, perhaps exacerbated by wear when comparing with the other coins. The collar wasn't tilted, or you'd have noticed a tilted partial collar long before thinking you saw slanted reeds. The only way to have slanted reeds would be to have them slanted on the collar, much as the only way to have IN GOD WE TRVST be italicized would be to have it italicized on the obverse die. I don't see any funny business with the 2 in the date. Perhaps the lighting of the curl of the is playing tricks on you. No reason to doubt the coin is legit. Even the word GOD is strong, as it is on all 1926 Peace dollars.
I'd agree with that IF it was tilted far enough to not contain the planchet. But, if it was only tilted slightly, so that the top half of the planchet edge was contained on the high side, then I believe what I described above is what would happen. Think of it like this John, the top and bottom lines represent the edge of the planchet: __________________ _ __________________ The hyphen on the right represents where the high side of the collar is on the planchet. On the low side, the edge of the planchet is completely contained. (obviously I can't tilt the illustration with a keyboard, but that should give you the idea what I'm I'm describing) And yes, I do agree that if the reeding in collar was tilted when the collar was made, that would do it too.
If it were tilted that slightly, you'd never notice anything amiss with the reeds. If the reeds were tilted (they're not), and they were tilted by 1 degree, that would be unnoticeable. I'll give a frame of reference. When I work on photos on my 20" desktop monitor, I'll be looking at a large picture of a slab and notice that the barcode is not level from left to right if it's off by 0.5° or more, but this is over a distance of about 4" on the screen, which makes one end of the barcode just under 1 mm higher than the other, and I've had a good deal of practice. An unworn reed is 2.4 mm. If you have a 1° tilt, you'd have one end of a reed be 0.04 mm off, which you would not notice. In the other direction, since a dollar is 38.1 mm in diameter, a 1° tilt would put part of the coin 0.6 mm -- 25% of its thickness -- out of the collar. But wait, there's more. That would only tilt the reeds 90° away from the maximal out-of-collar spot (i.e., at 3 and 9 o'clock if the maximal out-of-collar spot is at 12) by 1°. The only way all of the reeds can be slanted is if the collar is slanted, and the tool used to make the collar dies would not make slanted reeds.
I assume you mean part of the top edge of the planchet would not be in the collar. The anvil die sits within the collar so the bottom edge will always be inside the collar unless the collar is missing completely. (The high side of the collar gets the full reeding the low side does not. ) Next what you have described is a partial tiled collar and the unstruck portion would remain unstruck after the coin is pushed out. 180 degrees around for that point the reeds would be unusually heavy due to the scraping as the coin was pushed out, but they would also be perpendicular to the faces of the coin. 90 degrees around you would have the greatest angling of the reeds and most likely the most damage to them from the ejection of the coin. If the collar was tilted so slightly that the entire planchet was still within the coining chamber, you would have a coin with perpendicular reeds at two points becoming gradually more angled as you go around the coin to the 90 degree point ( and being progressively more mangled as well) and then lessening again as you approach the 180 degree point where they will again be perpendicular to the faces. There are only two ways I know of to apply a evenly angled reeding all the way around the coin. A multi part collar, or applying the reeding in a separate step.
The collar was probably worn and had widened ever so slightly. Maybe take a measurement of the diameter and see what that is. From the picture it looks like the reeding didn't cut into the planchet very deep. That's my guess. All phone pics post sideways. You should try taking the picture sideways on your end. It looks like it posts 90 degrees ccw.
I thought about that, too, but putting a straight rule across the photo eliminates that possibility. The reeds really are angled relative to the coin's orientation. Put an image of an L-square so that one edge is flat against the coin's face, and the reeds are at an actual angle to the other leg. But so are the reeds on the leftmost coin. They're at the opposite angle. Question, @hcmusicguy -- this image looks like you cropped it from a larger photo (and did a good job of selecting the region of interest -- thanks!). Can you remember where this area fell in the original image? In other words, when you drew a box around this area on the original image, was it toward the top, toward the bottom, the left, the right, or squarely in the middle? I'm seeing some perspective stuff going on, as I'd expect from a close shot with a fairly wide-angle lens, and I'm trying to think about how that plays into this...
A partial collar strike, and that's what I've been talking about all along, can happen in two different ways - the collar is tilted, or the planchet is tilted. And it can have many different results. One of those results is tilted reeding. Another is what is commonly referred to as a railroad rim, another is a beveled edge, yet another is a partially reeded rim, to name a few. The point is, it happens, it's known, it's not terribly uncommon.
