I pulled this coin out of the change the other day.......it kind of jumped out from the rest of the Jeffs. I can't get over how well struck the new Jeffs are and the detail on Monticello is simply exquisite.
That's actually a really nice one to pull out of circulation! The ones I have found have many more bag marks. :thumb:
Oh yeah Ken. Outstanding detail on the reverse. I have really noticed that when I dump $20 of change on the table...some nickels, even state quarters, really stand out. They are just blazing with luster and sometimes prooflike compared to the rest of the same year/type. Of course I keep them and throw them into their own jar. Your's is a prime example of what I mean.
Yeah, I actually am wondering about that. When I was filling my Ike Dansco, Every P&D was taken from mint sets. Then one time when I went to a bank and was able to grab 300 that some lady just brought in. Half of those were absolute stunners and looked 10xs nicer then any of the Ikes from mint sets. More specifically the strikes and the luster. This also happens when I buy original bank wrapped rolls of nickels. The ones in the rolls always seem to be nicer then any I plucked from mint sets. So do you know, is there any ryhme or reason to that? How did they determine which coins went into a mint set, and which ones were wrapped for circulation? Is it all by chance that the rolled seem to be much nicer? edit: here is an Ike I mentioned. this was from the bank: None of my mint set Ikes looked like this.
Holy smokes, you are right. There were at least 30 from 1973 in the group I got from the bank. I didn't even realize that! How the heck did that happen. Her or her husband must have busted them out of sets. Here is a 1978 from the same lot:
Nice find ! I have been doing dimes lately, and am really finding some nice ones in CRWs. I even upgraded a couple in my main set. Now that set has been a work in progress for quite a while now and the coins are really pretty good. Finding something to swap one of those with is tough. But I now have a few rows where the onl;y difference in luster between the business strikes and the proofs is the cameo. I just don't know how coins that look that good can be in circulation. I always check the reeding, and some of the coins are pristine. I figure someone must toss them aside from a new roll or something ? And like Ken said, some are nicer than the mint sets. Go figure ? gary
I've pulled about 5 or 6 of these types of Jefferson nickels from change from the vending machine at work. I quickly set them aside as keepers.
It's not hard to understand. All you have to do is consider a few things. A coin from a production run, struck with new dies and where everything was just perfect. The die spacing was just right, the die alignment was just right, the striking pressure was just right, a better than usual planchet just happened to get fed into the press at that same time all of these other things occurred - and an exceptional coin from the production run is the result. Maybe even quite a few exceptional coins. Now when you go to compare this exceptional coin to the Mint Set coins and it looks better than they do, there's a reason for that too. The opposite happened with the particular set or sets that you're comparing it to. Maybe they (the Mint Set coins) came from dies near the end of their life, maybe the adjustments were off slightly, maybe the planchets were worse than others, there's a multitude of possible explanations. Point is it happens from time, it just doesn't happen very often.
