Saw this coin posted on another forum and thought it might make for a nice discussion. What do you think caused the lines? Die polish, cleaning, something else?
Really coarse die polishing. If you look at the "I" in LIBERTY you can see that the scratches run from one side of the letter to the other without showing on the letter. Thats because the scratch was on the die. Richard
Thats a Mercury dime (Winged Liberty Head Dime) 1916-1945. The W is acually an A over a W which is the designers initials Adolph Alexander Weinman. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolph_Alexander_Weinman edit: beat me by mere sconds desertgem.
I was just kidding when I said this. Leroy Van Allen attributes Morgan dollar VAM's, and there is a huge series of VAM's called "Scribbles". Chris
Does die polish affect luster? The reason I ask is that I have a Pan-Pac with the same marks - where the squiggles are the heaviest, the luster is the weakest.
I think cleaned with something...it is interesting how there is toning in parts and it stops at the edge of the scribbles. That makes me think the scratches were from a cleaning instrument and where it was not cleaned either toning started or continued. However, I am not an expert on this subject, so I will put more confidence on those with more years and experience.
As I have explained many times, die polishing was done by holding the face of the die against a large, spinning zinc plate. Now if you envision something the size of a coin die being held against a zinc plate that is several inches across it should be obvious that it would be impossible for any marks left behind by that zinc plate to curve within the face of the die or for those marks to cross one another simply because of the size relationship between the two objects. So marks such as those on this coin cannot be from die polishing. Yes these marks were on the die, but there are and were other things done to dies besides polishing them. Sometimes a coin is abraded with sharp pointed, cutting tools - think of something like a dental pick. This was done to try and remove small marks or damage to the die caused sometimes by minor clash marks and sometimes by foriegn object damage like a strikethrough. It was these tools that caused marks like this on the die. There is a difference between die polish marks and die scratches. The marks on this coin are the result of die scratches (from tool marks), not from die polishing. Every coin you've ever seen comes from dies that were polished. The very word polish means to make smooth, to remove any scratches from a surface - not create scatches on that surface.
