What's going on with this 3 cent?

TH

These happen when the die is tilted, mis aligned in the collar, failure of die alignment. Clashes in the recesses are considered in the error community as valuable. It is starting to look like these are a retained struck thru, retained strike debris, thanks to @KBBPLL research. I could be wrong, sometimes I wonder if these scribbles ever turned into a shattered die. As Randy eluded to these coins were a mess when it came to trying to strike them. The composition became a nightmare for the mint and die life.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

Gosh, the bottom pair are actually the same as the subject coin! Took me a while! Only after I put this montage together did I finally realize it. It's just that these two are in AU grades and worn.


The same areas on the subject coin, from the PCGS image (look up the cert# from the GC auction).


The other two similar examples but on a different die.

 

There's another one on Heritage. That's four of them. It's also being discussed on Sleepy Hollow (NGC forum).

 

I had never heard of the Superbird so I dug into that a bit.

How on earth did anyone ever think the Superbird was from a mint mark punch? Here is the Superbird S along with the S on the quarter, dime, nickel, and cent for 1952, all made the same relative sizes based on the diameter of the coins. The Superbird S is clearly one-third of the size of any S mint mark punch. Occam's Razor says the 3CN, "5 on cheek" and Superbird are all from the same phenomenon - "working die struck-through" is my guess.

 

As a variety, This is a die that retained the images of a strike thru. unretained when it struck the coin. Thanks to the images a variety was born @KBBPLL I hope the 3 cents. as a denom, comes back alive. I would make them 90 silver. Nice sleucing on the 68. What a fun coin!

 

I am the original poster but the original thread was started on a different site. After some thought and discussion we are going to call it the 'hairy 3CN' as there are at least 10 different spots on the obverse that there are fibers or hairs raised on the coins surface that look like hairs falling from Liberty. That means that those details were on the working die that pressed the coin. There have been at lest 4 other coins found on various websites from previous sales or a current one that have the same anomaly. I am not sure where to go from here to try to get this error recognized. I was going to post on the CONECA forum but it has been down for quite some time. Any suggestions?

 

Jason you have a Variety, I would search the 3 cent specialists, having another get it to the right eyes could be benneficial. Not value wise but a cherry-picking aspect. It is getting more obvious that the Var. could be on many more coins. PCGS took away our ability to get more in depth when Sperber threw a fit over a 58 Franklin. PCGS took all the auction records in fear or being guilty of over grading. I hope you find your coin getting an ID.

 

The Ultimate Guide to US Three Cent Nickels is here.
https://archive.org/details/guideusthreecent2003gifford/page/188/mode/1up

Rarity-wise, it's probably quite common. I easily found 4 of them (including locating yours on GC) for 1868, and one is currently being auctioned. Above source says approximately 65 obverse dies were used, and estimates 73,010 survivors (where they get such a precise number, no idea). So the surviving output from this die would be about 1,100 coins. That's a lot.

The full "hairy" aspect of this might depend on die state too. I am now thinking we are seeing two different things on this coin. The squiggly seems to clearly be struck-through debris during the hubbing of the die (I doubt such damage could occur to a hardened die during the striking of coins). The other "hairs" I now suspect are internal stress fractures in the die, aka die cracks. I will post some images shortly. I have found similar combinations of a strike-through and multiple internal die cracks in other years too.