In an average year how many die pairs will the mint go through for the Lincoln Cent...or other denominations?
Purely as a general rule of thumb - for clad coins divide the mintage by 250,000 and you'll have a rough number of die pairs. For cents use 350,000.
The tour guide at the Denver mint said each die is used to strike approximately 1 million blanks. There were a number of questions I asked where I questioned if his answer was correct or not so take it for what it is worth.
Thanks for the responses. I thought I read somewhere that dies are destroyed after use, but a while back I saw some dies up for auction on Ebay.
They are defaced - meaning the design is ground away. But then the mint does sell of them after that. There was a time when you could buy canceled dies, those had a large X cut into the face of the die - essentially destroying it. But they don't do that any more - now they completely destroy the face of the die.
Wow ! Times have changed. In the early days of the Mint, a die might last 10,000-20,000 strikes - 1%-2% of today's die life. There are cases in which a die cracked within the first few strikes.
Interesting to note that in the early days the mint simply stored the dies in the coiner's vault. They were still serviceable. Which led to some intrigue... Mint workers retrieved old dies and made restrikes and fantasy pieces to order and sold 'em to collectors. This hustle started in the late 1850s after the start of the first coin collecting craze (after the 1857 retirement of the Large Cent).
At one time the dies were sold after used from the mint, but then only had a cross ground accross the face, later they would grind off the whole face. One of our club members has some sets. -O)
I bought a die from Arnie Margolis a couple years ago for $15 and the entire face was ground off. Does anyone know where to get info on the year of the die by using the ID # on the die? ( D3-465781 ) I know the D is for Denver... Thanx...
There have been just a few recent releases of dies from the US Mint. There were some back around 64 and some others in 68, but both of those had the die face cancelled through the use of a cuting torch. Then there were the release of the Olympic dies in 96 that used the cuts across the die face for cancelling. The vast majority of the released dies have been done since 1999 and they have had the entire die face ground off (Mostly these were state quarters but there were some dies of the other denominations as well.) I would agree that the D on you die stands for Denver, and my bet is the 3 after the D indicates the last digit of the date it was for, in this case 2003. Then the rest of the number is the actual serial number of the specific die.
OK, thanks alot I'll go ahead and mark my die 2003. Makes me wish that I should have bought the reverse at the same time...
