Hey Everybody, I'm new here, been doing some looking around and seems like this would be a good place to get some answers... I love coin roll hunting and recently was going through some wheat penny rolls and found this 1944 that is struck on a planchet that is a couple mm too small, it has almost no rim and is noticeably smaller than a normal wheat penny. I've searched through several hundred rolls and never found another that was this small, It looks like a mint error, what do y'all think? . . .
Do you think the edge has been shaved/filed at some point? it does have a few dings in the edge but most of it is very uniform, looks too smooth to have been done with tools of some sort .
Back in the 50s and 60s, when vending machine technology was still low tech, people could file down cents and use them in place of a dime to buy a coke or something. Coins are struck in a collar of a fixed size. For your coin to have left the mint like that, A smaller collar would have to be manufactured, force fit into the coining chamber, and somehow not get damaged from the larger dies when struck the coin. That can't happen. Somebody with time on their hands did a nice job shaving it down. Occasionally, somebody asks a question about these and the workmanship is usually a lot more crude