I don't even know how this is possible! This is possibly the finest Lincoln cent I've found seaching. This coin blew me away immediately. Just a beautiful, obverse rainbow toning on proof-like surfaces and almost completely hit free. It took a lot of effort to capture the rainbow toning with my camera. The pics aren't too bad, but they still don't tell the whole story. This is truly a rainbow in hand.
The striations going from 2 to 8 have me confused. The affect the obverse fields AND Lincoln but apparently not the letters. My best guess is that they were on the original planchet. Interesting.
I had the same thing happen with my 78s Morgan. Raider34 stated Those are polish lines, they happen during the minting process, if the die had been wiped or polished. (Usually in many cases to remove clash marks). I am not sure if that applies to Lincolns' was well but I thought i point it out.
Yes you can have die polish lines on Lincolns. But kanga is correct in this case. Those are marks on the underlying zinc planchet. Die polish lines would not be on the devices like that.
I have no idea. It was in a huge container of 25 year old change a friend gave me to go through. I pulled a ton of 80's BU coins from it, but this one just blew me away. I took out the 87 from my Memorial cent album and put this one in. I went from a 64 to this 67!
