First may I thank everyone for all of your well educated and informative answers to my posts in the past. I am very new to looking for variety and error coins, and I'm totally hooked. I do try to do my research as best I can before posting questions here, and thanks to answers to my somewhat dumb questions of the past I have learned of resources that are out there and how to use them. However I find myself to still be struggling. It has been frustrating at times thinking I found something worthy of asking about only to find out it was PMD that fooled me. But I am learning a lot! I've found about a dozen coins over the last couple days that I thought at first were worthy of investigating further, but was able to rule them out as mint errors by myself. With all that said, I found this 1952d LWC that I haven't been able to rule out of having a RPM. Nor can I seem to find enough evidence to prove that it is. So once again I pose a coin to the experts here to help me identify, or explain to me possibly why it cannot be ruled one way or the other. Looking at http://varietyvista.com/02a LC RPMs Vol 1/RPMs 1952D.htm and considering the shape and position of the mint mark I think it may be 1952-D RPM-021 or 1952-D RPM-023. However I can't seem to spot any of the die markers on the coin. Possibly due to the wear on the coin, or my inexperience in looking for them, or maybe the fact that they just never were there. Any advice here is much appreciated. Both advice on this coin, and advice in general for looking for such things. I have been concentrating on LWC for the time being since I have a lot of them readily available and I understand that when learning to search for these it is better to concentrate on one coin type so that you become very familiar with every aspect of that type an it will be easier to spot errors when you find them.
Being as the mintmarks were hand-punched into the dies at that time you can often use the varying positions to exclude certain possibilities. That said, the anomaly on your coin strikes me as likely being a striking issue as opposed to an RPM, at least based upon the provided photos.
By striking issues do you mean things like DDD or machine doubling? (I'm still learning the terminology)
Indeed. The "secondary" mintmark appears somewhat flat and shelf-like (at least to my eye on an iPhone) as opposed to being repunched. Have you compared the mintmark location on your coin to the linked possibilities? If not please do give it a try. Sometimes positions can be close enough that doing a photo overlay is necessary (or at least helpful) in determining any differences, but often just a naked eye comparison is sufficient. However, it's worth mentioning that the final year for hand-punched mintmarks on cents was 1989. No problem with not being familiar with the different terms. There's a lot of them and many can be confusing. We've all been there.
Yes I did a naked eye comparison. That in part is how I narrowed it down to the two possibilities that I mentioned in my original post. I am unsure how to do a photo overlay. Is there certain software that you use to help you do this? I would love to know how to do this. That would be a very useful tool.
Very good! You're ahead of the game then. When still active in this hobby I used Photoshop, but it was (and is) a rather costly program, especially if someone is only using it for coins. However, I do know of two similar free programs that seem fairly popular with some of the guys here. One is called "gimp" and the other "photoscape", but unfortunately I'm not sure if either are capable of doing overlays. Perhaps @green18 or @desertgem can shed some light upon the issue?
I don't think this thing is in the 'photoscape' stable. Never seen it, but OP's Photogs look like they don't need it. Excellent stuff......
Overlays are for comparative purposes, but decent photos taken dead-on certainly make it an easier job. Thanks, Green. I very much appreciate the response.
Thanks for that, I'll definitely check those programs out and see what they have to offer that will be helpful.
Thank you for the compliment of the photos. I know I have a lot of ignorance in this realm, but that is to be expected since it is new to me. But I do struggle and try to do my best to come here with good info to look at, and only ask the questions that I have not been able to figure out doing my own research first. Letting me know that I have learned to take proper pictures to post tells me that I'm on the right track.
