Will someone please tell me why most 1980's nickels I see have a...mushy...look to them? I've noticed that most the time I can tell one from looking at the reverse, before even turning it over.
Pretty simply, they overused the dies... much as they did in 1964. 1983-P nickels in particular are often very poorly struck on the reverse. You see it a lot in the early 1980s coins made in Philadelphia, not so much in the Denver issues.
It seems to me that in the mid-late 80s the mints were struggling to keep coins attractive. Look at like cents from 1987 most are die deteriorated and poorly produced imo.
I've got a bunch of 82-P and 83-P nickels I need to sort through tonight into the morning - just sold some on eBay... shouldn't be hard to find some with the mushy vs. the non-mushy ones... the difference is pretty striking.
Yes, I think they are mostly 1982 and 1983 nickels that look like what I'm talking about. I'll have to take some pictures, but yes probabl Yes, tomorrow I'll take a few pictures and post them on here. Sorry for the delayed response, I've been busy with school with finals coming up, and haven't been on here much.
Crazily enough the mint redid the dies for the 1987 nickels and they have deeper reliefs than the earlier or later coins. They are actually well struck and attractive coins. Similar dies were used on some of the 1988 coins, but only maybe a quarter of them because the rest went back to the lower relief low details coins.
I think it was mostly on 80s cents , if you look at even high grades they couldn't keep the coins from bubbling up either, I think it was a result to switching to copper coated zinc. -SC
Another contributing factor could be that many of the nicer 82 and 83 coins were plucked from circulation since no mint sets were released, and therefore UNC nickels of those two years carry a slight premium.
When I acquired a bag of 1982-P quarters from a local bank the vault manager found the request so odd that he contacted several Chicago area banks and asked them if any had ever heard of someone wanting new coins to set aside. They told him they had never heard of such a thing since back in the 1960's (1964) except for pennies. I can assure you even if you wanted nice 1982/ '83 nickels that you'd have had a fantastically difficult job to get them. But finding them was the hard part. It was even harder than finding nice quarters. No mechanism existed in 1982 to set coins aside. There was no infrastructure. The average person would have encountered about 100 brand new 1982 quarters in every day trade during '82 to '84 and 99 of them were junk. One was anywhere from nice MS-64 to MS-67. Almost nobody noticed the nice coin they encountered and if they had they'd have probably spent it. These coins aren't cheap because they are common. They are cheap because few people want them. The grading services overgrade them quite a bit but true Gem '82 quarters are rare. I seriously doubt even ten exist and nickels are tougher.
You hit the nail on the head. Without Mint Sets, the quality of the product was not enforced in my opinion.
Oh God! I am making unintentional puns now. LOL. Seriously was not thinking when I wrote that... Sheesh!
