A couple of recent posts got me thinking about adjustment marks. First, a post by @johnmilton showed a gold coin with adjustment marks that was much later than I had thought adjustment by file had occurred at the mint. And, in a recent post about a 1795 dollar, a poster asked how to tell the difference between scratches and adjustment marks. So this post asks two questions. Please post your photos of coins with adjustment marks as a gallery of what they look like and also to see how late this process was used at the mint. I'll start with a 1795 half dollar. I posit that adjustment marks are generally cut deep, wide, and spaced a bit far apart, indicating that the adjustment file used was deliberately chosen to be coarse. This shows up in the coins we see. While we sometimes say that adjustment marks are characterized by parallelism and that is true, that argument alone is insufficient because we sometimes (often) see PMD scratches that are also parallel. I believe that a further determinant of the adjustment mark is the depth, width and spacing of the marks that would be caused by a coarse file. A third determinant is that the marks, even if present on the central device, should also be apparent on the rim and/or near-rim devices and lettering. I prefer to see all three of these characteristics. Now, I am going to indulge myself by positing the what, how and why of the adjustment process at the early mint. Some of this in based on scholarly research (by others) and some is just my logical inference which you are free to debate. But if you follow along, you will able to see how I developed the criteria in the previous paragraph. Adjustments of the final coin's weight for silver and gold coins was necessitated by the mint's statutory and fiscal need to ensure that overweight coins were not issued for circulation. This was primarily necessitated due to the limitations of the mint's planchet sheet roller mills which sometimes produced over and underweight planchets. Underweight coins were undesirable because they would have difficulty being accepted in commerce and because the depositors of the silver and gold from which the coins were made would have felt, and been, cheated. Imagine you are designing a late 18th century production line which must meet two fundamental industrial requirements: 1) Must be inexpensive, and; 2) Must be fast. Since most of our early technology relied heavily upon human labor input, a lot of low and semi-skilled labor that was not heavily dependent upon muscle power was supplied by women. And where small fingers and fine motor control were a bonus, we often see a bias toward women employees even today. Thus, the Mint employed mostly, maybe all, women to serve as adjustors. Not only were they good at fine muscle control but they also typically earned less than men, sometimes much less. The production line was set up to process all silver and gold coins except I can't recall seeing adjustment marks on half dimes, dimes or quarters. So perhaps only half dollars, dollars and gold coins were subjected to the process. Nevertheless, there were a lot of coins to process. I am relatively certain that the process was set up so that each adjustor did not have to actually weigh the coin, i.e. ascertain the exact weight. In the interest of speed and to limit errors, their pan balance scales would have been set up with a single reference weight, possibly the statutory weight of the coin in question. The pointer and it's background scale would have been set up with lower limit and upper limit boundary markers, a sort of go-nogo gauge that could be read very rapidly. No waiting around for the needle to settle exactly and no fussing about with various weights to get a balance at 0 for an actual weight. If a coin was lightweight, i.e. the pointer was to the wrong side of the low weight go-nogo mark, the adjustor could very quickly throw the coin into the "remelt" bin. If the coin was overweight, then the adjustor would give it a rip with a file. Adjustors would, with time and experience, learn to gauge how much metal to remove with the file in order to bring the coin into compliance. We see a lot of coins with marks that indicate only one pass of the file. To this end, quick and rapid adjustment, the file used would have to be coarse. A coarse file would have the added advantage of producing larger filings which would have less tendency to get lost on the bench, floor and in clothing. As an aside, I have read that at least some mint workers had their clothes removed at the end of the shift for the mint to wash and remove metal dust and shavings. I don't know if this applied to the ladies in the adjustment department but it stands to reason that the coarser the filings, the less chance of the metal getting lost in the clothing. Finally, on the matter of where adjustment marks appear on the coin, think about trying to hold a coin and draw a file across it. Since the coin was almost certainly held in the fingers the file would necessarily have to approach the coin at an angle from the rim inwards toward the center in order to clear the fingers. This is another argument in favor of this being ladies work with their smaller digits and finer motor control. While it certainly possible for the adjustment marks to contact the central device, by the time the angled file touched the central device the cuts would have been shallower than at the rim. And this is largely what we see when we examine the coins. To recap: 1) Adjustment marks should be parallel, except when there is evidence that more than one pass of the file made separate cuts. 2) Adjustment marks should be deep, wide and widely spaced, evidence of a coarse file being employed. 3) Adjustment marks should be deeper at the rim than toward the center.
Thanks for that post, Publius. That makes a lot of sense. Based on your information I think the marks on my 1797 dollar are most likely post mint damage (scratches).
