I have never been able to find any----but I do understand that the design was made without the eagle on the back and the mint dir. had him add it---I'm not sure if there were any patterns made without the eagle or not...but to this day I can't find any trace of any such pattern for the Franklin Half Dollar. Speedy
I'm not aware of any struck patterns still in existance, I seem to recall a couple of drawings. There are really very few true pattern coins after 1916. After 1896 they really started clamping down on patterns leaving the mint. There may be a couple of 1910 -1912 nickel patterns, and most of the 1916 patterns that exist today do so because they were similar enough to the adopted design that they were accidently sent out into circulation with the regular coinage. The 1942 cent patterns were made by outside testing firms not the mint, only three true Martha Washington clad coinage test pattern exist and they are in the Smithsonian, the 1969 roller press patterns were test pieces made by GM, and the recent Martha Washington pieces that have been showing up have also been made by outside firms using dies supplied by the mint for test purposes. And in a couple of cases the "patterns" are fantasies made up by the outside firms. Two Martha Washington "cents" on copper plated zinc blanks using dime sized dies are known. But the Mint has stated that the Martha Washington dies were not used in the testing of the copperplated zinc material. So where did they come from? Obviously from someone playing around at one of the firms that had the dies on loan. The closest thing to a mint made pattern available since 1916 are the prototype Sac dollars with the reverse of 1999. The Cheerios Sacs. Oh how could I have forgotten the 1974 aluminum cents and the 1974 bronze clad steel cents, or the 2000-W gold sacs (But they aren't really a pattern, or are they?). And one other with is not currently known but which may show up some day, 2000-S business strike Sac dollars. (A production run of 2000-S business strike sacs were produced to test to see how the new composition worked in real life production. Supposedly all were destroyed, but since they were struck in Philadelphia where half a billion P coins were also struck there is a small chance that some may have gotten out with the P mint coins. (Stuck in the press or in a hopper and then later came loose.)
I read somewhere that the Franklin revers was copied from the 1926 American Independence Sesquicentennial and the obverse was copied from a franklin medal. Speedy is correct first design was made without the eagle but then add for some reason that escapes me at the moment.
