Capped Bust half dime attribution tool

Greetings. Just wanted to share this tool for those who are interested in trying to attribute Capped Bust half dimes: https://groovycoins.com/attribution

Feedback / comments requested!

 

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Thank you.

 

Nice site!! Now I just need to find a Half Dime.

 

Not familiar with Capped Bust Half Dimes but

My count shows the series used 39 different Obverse Dies and 36 different Reverse Dies?

What about reverse I, O and II ?

Nice Site - is this your creation?

 

I had the privilege of hearing @bikergeek talk about and demonstrate this site at last week's JRCS Zoom meeting. He developed it from previous work and used AI to write the software. It is the most complete and accurate capped bust half dime work out there and incorporates the latest research and scholarship (his and others) since Logan and McCloskey published their work in 1988.

The site is interactive, i.e. it responds to the selections you make on the coin's characteristics to narrow the possible dies and die marriages. It also has a gallery of hi-res photos of all the die marriages and remarriages and maps out the emission sequence.

The site works on my PC laptop (Dell) and also on my Android phone (Samsung). Although it's a little difficult on the phone due to the small screen size. Nevertheless, I will probably find it a useful adjunct to the book while on the bourse floor. I have a small, cheap pad that I bought from a waitress who was down on her luck, even though I didn't need it, so I'll try to see if the site will work on that. I'm sure it will work on bigger and better pads.

I have used this interactive site to attribute about a dozen coins since last week and found it generally easy to use. For someone accustomed to attributing from the book, it took a bit to acclimate to a different methodology. And of course, specialty collectors like myself develop their own set of favored characteristics to identify die marriages and that will necessarily differ slightly from those chosen by the author.

But that's a nit. This site is very neat. And I've already given the author a couple of suggestions to make it better, in my humble opinion - he may disagree.

So, kudos to @bikergeek for developing this and particularly so for making it available at no cost to the collecting community. I predict his name will go down alongside Bill Bugert not only for scholarship but for making his massive work on the Liberty Seated Half Dollars available gratis.

 

@Publius, thanks very much for the very kind words! I've got your note on attributing the 1835's handy. I'll get back around to that when I take another swing thru the detailed attributes. Today I had a bug to fix, and also an improvement on the Set List page: https://groovycoins.com/lm-xref (where I found myself clicking on the images, and being mad that they didn't go fullsize like the gallery page images do).

 

Just so I get a basic understanding of how the variety cataloging system for Capped Bust Dimes works - looking @ 1829 for instance, I see a listing for LM-6.1, LM-6.2, LM-6.3 and also listings for LM-7.1, LM-7.2, LM-7.3.

Are each of these a listing for a new unique different die pairing or an indication of a different die stage for each of the two (6 and 7) die pairings?

 

The early half dimes, 1794-1837, are a bit unique in that there are a lot of remarriages. To explain, a die marriage is the uniting of a unique obverse and reverse die to create a coin. The coin you mention, the 1829 LM-6 is the pairing of Obverse Die 4 and Reverse Die E. The first time those two dies are used together to strike coins dated 1829 is known as the LM-6.1. If the next use of the reverse die is with a different obverse die, then a different die marriage is created. But if that reverse die is then brought back together with Obverse Die 4, the resulting coins struck are known as the second remarriage, the LM-6.2.

Note that remarriages are defined by the REVERSE die. That is because the reverse dies were often used across multiple years resulting in die remarriages that spanned two or even more coinage years.