Is it just me? or does this "D" look crooked? Found this on the ground the other day, I thought the mint mark looked pretty weird.
Yes it does look crooked. But I don't think that is very uncommon. MInt marks then were placed by hand, so it is not uncommon to see a crooked mark, little to the left or right, a little high or low,.....
Ziggy is right! The MM was hand punched until 1989. The Mint then went to the "Single Squeeze" process. Rhubarb
Mint mark went to the model for the proof coins in 1985, the last hand punched mintmarks for business strikes was 1989 or 90, the single squeeze process for making dies was begun in 1995 and everything was single squeeze by the time the Denver mint opened their die shop in 1997.
Not on each coin but on each working DIE ........ Each die creates a mind boggling amount of coins. Well, maybe not mind boggling but a lot of them. I just don't have a real number to give
The mintmark was punched into each working die by hand, then each working die struck somewhere between 750K and 1 million cents So for every billion cents struck they had to hand punch roughly 1,000 dies. That means for example in 1989 they hand punched around 5,345 cent dies for Denver. Is it any wonder they didn't decide to use a P on the cents when they added it to the rest of the coin in 1980? That would have meant another 7,000 + dies that would have had to have been stamped with the P. It also explains why they added the mintmark to the models.
Maybe the strike was sort of like the credits at the very end of the old "Dragnet" show. Remember that big hairy and sweaty hand that had a hammer hit a 'die' and it made the roman numeral number? Unless I am the only one here too old to remember this... jeankay
