1958 wheat cent underweight

To answer Chris' question up stream, while the mint undoubtable performed "quality control" in 1958 and the early concepts of Statistical Process Control were known (see for example http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/pmc/section1/pmc11.htm), they were not widely employed in industry in 1958.

What ever QC was applied would have been random checks and the activities of the US Assay Commission (which is retrospective, i.e. well after the fact) were only applied to bullion coins (see http://www.numismaster.com/ta/numis/Article.jsp?ad=article&ArticleId=23619).

So it's entirely possible that the rolling process created a sheet with a thin end and this wasn't cut off, leading to a small # of underweight planchets which were not caught. A 20% thin planchet would be expected to be weakly struck.

 

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And I'm glad your gone!
(I know this is an old thread but I just had to say that)

 

I have a 1943 steel penny that's 1.6 grams

 

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