Lincoln cent on a different planchet. Not sure what planchet that would be. It is smaller than a cent but it is not a dime. Was the Mint making small bronze coins for another country when this coin was minted?
It appears to be a more severe form of this http://www.cointalk.org/showthread.php?t=31286&highlight=apron to me.
Could be a slug, but one that has been upset (it has a raised rim). A slug that diameter would not have gotten a raised rim in the same upset machine used to upset blanks for cents.
Most likely senario: Someone with too much time on their hands took a cent and hammered it to the size of a dime, to make a net profit of 9 cents.
I don't agree. The dies did not fully impress the details into the "planchet" because the raised rims were too high. In your case the rims would have been raised after the coin was minted. Assuming a normal strike the coin would have sharp details before the edges were hammered and the rims raised.
Still, wasting what, a couple hours and who knows how much in materials for a 9 cent gain? Even Meth heads could do better to satisfy their crack habits.
That does make it interesting but the subject coin appears to be a bit smaller in diameter than the dime. And it is very dark in color. Do we know the composition of the metal? Many of the clad coins that I have dug out of the ground while metal detecting are very dark like this one so it is possible the coin was struck on a dime planchet then lost or buried for a considerable amount of time (circa 1974 until recently). But I don't think so. (Hey, I've been wrong before and I'll be wrong again.)
This cent was damaged outside the Mint. The design has been pounded into an indistinct mush and metal has been relocated from the edge and rim to form a thin apron on each face. Exactly what causes this damage isn't clear, but I see these sorts of coins all the time. The appearance violates the finite constraints of the minting process in spades.
In the 1950's a Coke cost a dime. That was a lot of money to a kid. If you ground a cent down to dime size, it would work in the Coke machines...............:whistle:
Actually, I don't think Cokes went up to a dime until the early 1960s. I remember the uproar when Cokes went from a nickel to 6 cents and the hassle that entailed buying a drink from a machine. I don't remember the year that happened but I am thinking the late '50s (but I was just a kid then).
I can't prove it, the machines are way more sophisticated now. Anything that was close to the right size would work. I can remember hearing about kids spending the day wearing a cent down on the side walk to use it in the Coke machine. Even a round slug would work. It wasn't weight that mattered, it was size....
Fair enough, I was a witness There were so many ways to get around those old pop machines it was almost a joke. My favorite was to just walk up to one with a bottle opener - open the bottles and let the soda just pour into a pitcher.