Ok Im really confused now. I know your suppose to read the book before you buy, and thats what I did. But now Im more confused than I was before I read it. Ive been looking up some links here and there about mule notes. Is a mule note a note that has two different numbers for plates right? Micro and macro i really dont understand. I had 20 singles in my pocket and notices that the front number and the back number are all different, except for one. Do matching plate numbers mean anything. Am I using the term plate right? God now I kNow I really know nothing. Im sooooo confused. Can anyone break it down a little simpler. Thanks
Can get confusing so let's go micro and macro first. I'm using the modern $1 note as an example here for ease. A micro number is 1.0 mm. On a back plate this is the size used at the Washington D.C. printing facility. A macro number is 1.2 mm. On a back plate this is the size used at the Fort Worth printing facility. Look at some singles. If you just see a front plate number with no inititials it was printed in Washington D.C. If there is an FW in front it was printed in Fort Worth. Now look at the back plate numbers. You'll notice the FW note back plate number is noticeably larger as it is the macro. IF the Fort Worth note has a micro number it would be considered a mule (or to further confuse you may be listed as an engraving error). This DID happen with the 1995 series with back plate number 295 hence Fort Worth 295 errors. Front and back plates are not required to be the same. They are basically a cross reference to the master plate number. A good currency book will point out numbers to look for as mules. Bear in mind in some series mules are just as, if not more common, than non mules. Mules were a lot more common in older small sized currency than they are tody. Isn't this fun? Hope that explains it to you. clembo
nice explanation clembo! and General_Godlike ... YES it CAN be very confusing! That is why we have several very smart folks here in the currency forum to help answer most all questions! if you are confused, just post - one of them always answers Good Luck.. and have fun!
Yes, but let's not confuse modern notes with older ones while we're doing it. Plate numbers on modern notes come in two sizes, but they're not micro and macro--they're macro and huge. The huge size is used for the Fort Worth back plates, the macro size for everything else. Mules occurred back in the old days of the 1934 series, when the plate numbers were enlarged from micro to macro. The micro numbers are far smaller than any you'll see on modern notes; look at any Series 1928 or 1929 note for an example of micro. As the BEP was transitioning from the micro plates to the macro plates, they weren't careful about which face plates they used with which back plates. The result was mules--notes printed with a micro face and a macro back, or vice versa. In certain denominations and series, mules are very rare; in others they're common. (In the higher denominations, there are a few cases where every note in an entire series is a mule!) The earliest mules printed were in Series 1934; the latest in Series 1950 (though in the lower denominations they didn't persist for nearly that long). The term "mule" is also applied to a few similar transitional varieties in the large-size notes. In those cases, it was generally the location of the plate number that was changed, rather than its size. A note that has its face plate number here and its back plate number there is a mule; but you need a reference book to keep all the heres and theres straight. The term "mule" is also applied to some modern notes produced with back plates left over from an older series. In those cases, it's the plate numbers themselves that make the difference; the mule notes will have very low face plate numbers, but high back plate numbers. And again, you need a pretty thick book to tell you what "low" and "high" mean in each case. In each case, the key idea of a "mule" is that it's made from face and back plates from different eras. The face plate is a new plate and the back plate is an old plate (or vice versa), and some change in the way plates were made makes that distinction obvious on the note. Thus the Fort Worth 295 error is definitely not a mule, because it doesn't involve new/old plates. It's an engraving error, because plate 295 was incorrectly engraved with the wrong font size. The correct plate was used; the plate just has something wrong with it.
