i have started in to the adventure of roll searching. so to begin i picked up $10 worth of pennies from work before i left last night. i think i did pretty good i found many early 60's and 70' pennies. i found 4 wheaties. then i found these 3 sweet looking coins. what i really would like to know would these be considered woodies. i am really new to coin collecting so i dont know for sure. to me they do look like the have a bit of a wood grain. any info or input would be greatly appreciated.
Not really Urban, interesting tho. See the thread on woodies for some real good examples.....Rlm posted some exceptional pics there, along with a bunch of other forum members. As for me, the latest "true" woody I have seen is in the 30's decade
IMO they can be called "woodies", but with the even brown toning they aren't the spectacular type. Nothing like Mint red to really let the "grain" stand out. And like Arizona Jack said, the REAL good ones are from the early years.
"Woodies" is short for wood grained (caused by improperly mixed alloy). By the vary definition, the color is not uniform or even, but are variegated and uneven. They were fairly common in the early Lincolns, but pretty much ended by the 30's as the alloying knowledge improved. As for these specific Lincolns, the colors look pretty uniform to me.
they are very nice coins and if there not woodys you could call them bengals or tigers or zebra cents. you name them there yours .
The later dates with the woodgrain look are from toning. If you take a modern woody and strip it down with a wire brush, the woodgrain effect is gone. Yes, I did it to a modern one, I had to know. The lines come back as it retones. The older woodys have the lines actually in the mixture of the metal. I didn't strip down any of those though. I'm thinking the modern woodys are made from how the planchet sheet is drawn down to size.
I've been finding and keeping all of these modern "woodies" myself. Most are the late 70's and early 80's. They're pretty cool.
I see tons of 80Ds like that when roll searching, by far the most common date / mint to find them. I'm going to see if I can complete a set of 59 - 82 coins in about the pictured condition just for fun and to give me something else to look for in rolls. Haven't seen any zincs with that effect.
Brit - that was my plan too. I love the looks of them. I have found NO zinc specimens of these coins. But I am very curious to find out what the chemical or physical reasoning for this type of toning and would like to have a name or acronym assigned to this type of toning.
From what I can tell. the 29- is environmental toning and the 41- damaged. The 41- damage really makes the coin look like a woody. To know for sure, the reverse of the coin should have the same pattern as the observe. The true wood grain runs the whole way through the coin.
here is a thread with lots of good pics: http://www.cointalk.org/showthread.php?t=33409&highlight=woodys
That implies that the improper alloy mix IS all the way through the metal. If it was just a surface feature it would not come back as the coin retones. The woodgrain comes from the different composition streaks toning at different rates. If you wirebrushed a woodie from the teens you would get the same effect.
