What's going on with this 3 cent?

TH

These happen when the die is tilted, mis aligned in the collar, failure of die alignment. Clashes in the recesses are considered in the error community as valuable. It is starting to look like these are a retained struck thru, retained strike debris, thanks to @KBBPLL research. I could be wrong, sometimes I wonder if these scribbles ever turned into a shattered die. As Randy eluded to these coins were a mess when it came to trying to strike them. The composition became a nightmare for the mint and die life.

 

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Gosh, the bottom pair are actually the same as the subject coin! Took me a while! Only after I put this montage together did I finally realize it. It's just that these two are in AU grades and worn.


The same areas on the subject coin, from the PCGS image (look up the cert# from the GC auction).


The other two similar examples but on a different die.

 

There's another one on Heritage. That's four of them. It's also being discussed on Sleepy Hollow (NGC forum).

 

I had never heard of the Superbird so I dug into that a bit.

How on earth did anyone ever think the Superbird was from a mint mark punch? Here is the Superbird S along with the S on the quarter, dime, nickel, and cent for 1952, all made the same relative sizes based on the diameter of the coins. The Superbird S is clearly one-third of the size of any S mint mark punch. Occam's Razor says the 3CN, "5 on cheek" and Superbird are all from the same phenomenon - "working die struck-through" is my guess.