Just found this 1951 Nickel,came out of a Nickel roll....The top of the five is filled in. What do you Guys think caused that?
@SmokinJoe Dies have a lifecycle or die stages. Normally, as they get to the latter part of their lives, they enter Late Die Stage and Very Late Die Stage before being decommissioned (or they catastrophically fail). The devices tend to get mushy and weak points (typically thin areas) will break. Those areas result in the filled devices like the 5 or often times...in mintmarks. Certain decades tend to be worse than others (like the 50s and 60s for nickels), but pretty much this happens to every die no matter what year/decade. A break can happen at an earlier stage to, relative to die conditioning, but the odds improve as they get older and used more. You'll also notice that this tends to happen on the Hammer die as opposed to the Anvil die.
Generally yes. I recently read somewhere that there are some instances where it's switched, but didn't pay attention to the details. Sorry. I'm sure other members know this. It might be worth starting a new post. I'm guessing a lot of members would find the info interesting
@Oldhoopster is correct. Generally, the hammer die is the obverse and the anvil die the reverse. But I've also read that this isn't always the case.
I’ve seen 70,000 estimated I’m sure it varies as pressure settings, size of coins, hardness of metal, misaligned dies and more factors come into play I’ll bet those steel wartime cents were tough on dies
Output per day is something like 16 million cents per mint. How that divides amongst equipment and dies is anybody's guess I suppose. But 70,000 cents would only take around 5 minutes to produce.