need help with penny

I recently started gaining interest in coin searching. Started off watching youtube videos and I seem to be hooked. This made me dig through my change, although I dont think its anything major (i cant find any info on it), I seem to have a 1985 D Lincoln penny with "space shuttle" on it, as well as a small picture of a space shuttle. This is right above the date and mint mark. Anybody have any idea why its there?

 

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Sounds like a counterstamp. Lincoln cents have long been a favorite to be stamped with various images. There have been likeness of JFK, Lincoln smoking a pipe, outlines of the fifty states among others. First I have heard of a space shuttle stamp though.

 

Awesome thank you. Im sure youre right. Im brand new to the site but will upload a photo of it shortly. Looks kind of like a stamp, pushed inward i guess. For some reason it seems like it has a white outline. Funny thing was, I have a big bag of wheat pennies that i checked dates on, nothing major. Decided to check the rest in my jar and found that weird space shuttle lol

 

Possibly looks whitish because this is a clad coin and the punch could have gone through the copper shell and exposed the zinc. New ones would be worth $1, but this one is more worth $0.01

 

Yup thats a counterstamp. I started coin roll hunting (CRH) the same way you did haah! lots of YT vids!
Nice find.



-SC

 

Yes this is right, however it is plated and not a clad
Just a little reminder

 

Want to define plated and clad?

 

Plated, a thin coating of the coin. In this case copper is the thin coating.
Clad, a metal sandwiched between two other sheets of the same metal.
My definitions. Lets see Google's:
Plated: cover (a metal object) with a thin coating or film of a different metal.
Clad, *Takes a bit of scrolling down the Google dictionary:
provide or encase with a covering or coating.

So Google says the same things but numismatists disagree.
The Spruce, a coin collecting website defines clad as so:
A clad coin is a coin that has multiple layers of metal in it.

So I guess it is somewhat opinionated, but generally coin collectors see the two as different.

 

I did some looking too and found little agreement. Consider "Gold Clad" usually represents a piece that is made from a bar of base metal that is first gold coated and then drawn to a thinner form used for the piece. In coins, after thinking about it, dimes and quarters are clad - struck from planchets that are a sandwich of a metal contained between two sheets of CuNi...cents are struck from planchets that are struck from zinc and then plated with copper. So, actually I agree with you, but the terms are used interchangeably. Cents are uniformly copper on the outside...dimes and quarters are copper on the edges.

 

Yea interchangeably used. Interesting.

 

Checking non-numismatic sources for numismatic terms can be a bit tricky. To me, in regard to coins, plated and clad are miles apart and not the least bit interchangeable.

Clad is multilayers of solid metal fused together - a sandwich. The edge should show the layers. Plated is a solid metal planchet covered in a thin coating of another metal (no layers visible on the edge).

Of course, there might be a coin somewhere that tests the boundaries, such as a two layer coin (clad usually implies three layers - a core metal sandwiched in between outer layers of another metal), or a coin that was struck from a planchet that had been punched from a strip of metal that had been plated before the blanks were punched out of it (the edge might show the layers but the outer payers are the plating).

Just my opinion....

 

We can also talk about luster if you wish...

 

Or definition of uncirculated lol.

 

Yes, they are not the same, but read my post a little closer "interchangeably used," I didn't say the two words are interchangeable.