Enjoy! Note the typical pick up points - the lines of the star aren't exactly 72 degree corners. The crude reverse (especially the orbs and bars inside the C (look at 10-11 o'clock). The surrounding stars aren't sharp and the branch at the top is crude...
Another lovely example. The dead givaways are the lines in the shield and the varying line thickness in the star's edges.
Dave, give the poor guy some credit. The mint's die makers have good light, reducing lathes, straight edges, clean smooth plaster, an annealing oven for making hubs and dies, etc. They have blank cutting presses, coining presses and lots of other professional tools. The counterfeiter is sitting in the back room of a squalid tenement, cutting by hand and the light of a tallow drip. It's amazing he still has his thumbs, let alone that the counterfeit coin looks a bit like the original. Then he throws the die into the fire and fishes it out to quench it in the, um, being delicate here, chamber pot. He has to make coin blanks by cutting them out of sheets of German Silver or low purity silver (maybe using some kind of a round die to punch them out). Finally, he has to fit the two dies into some kind of jig with a blank between them and hit it one solid blow with a sledge hammer. All to make a 3 cent coin out of 1 cent of raw materials. Which he sells to a distributor at 2c each so they can pass them as 3c. Wouldn't you drink? Heavily? Cheap rot-gut whisky???
Flynn and Zack list 1851-TCS-1/A (obverse die 1, reverse A) German Silver 1853-TCS-1/A Silvered Brass 1859-TCS-1/A Silver (0.89g, so must be low fineness) 1860-TCS-1/A German Silver 1861-TCS-1/A Silver 1861-TCS-2/B Silver (0.65g) 1861-TCS-2a/C Silver (called 2a because it looks like the same obverse die as 2/B but cracked) 1861-TCS-3/D Silver (0.68g) 1861-TCS-4/E German Silver, 0.64g (the dies are unique per year if I'm understanding the book correctly, so the A die from 1851 is not the A die from 1859.
It's actually a passable counterfeit that most in the not know category would have contemporarily not given a second look. Fascinating given that it was a low value coin with not a lot of profit margin vs. a dime or half dime.
Check this one out. Never seen one quite like it, but it even looks like they attempted to carve the typical die clash on the reverse!
One interesting consideration on why to fake a 3c piece, they're so freakin' small that the detail issues probably are much more difficult to see in hand versus blown up image on the computer.
Love contemporary counterfeits. I have a brass seated liberty half dollar and a German silver gold dollar. Where do you find these?
I wonder how many counterfeits (especially with wear) are in the collections of the unsuspecting? And how many thousands a counterfeiter would have turned out over the course of their career?