What would be the proper name or description I should use to identify these coins? The 1971 D is on a 95% copper planchette, it has the same thickness and diameter as a dime and weighs 2.2g. The 2012 D is on a cupronickel planchette, it has the same thickness and diameter as a dime and weighs 2.2g. (You can see Roosevelt's silhouette in the background of Lincoln turned 90° CW, see overlaid photo )Black areas on the 2012 D are worn flat with their surrounding devices. Thank you in advance for commenting on my coins.
the 71 D has been damaged by acid, the 2012 appears to have spent some time in a commercial dryer. The dime image you are seeing is your eyes playing tricks on you.
As stated above and the modern zinc cents don't have any nickel in them. A Zinc core with a paper thin layer of copper.Actually nickel hasn't been used in a cent since the flying eagle design.
No it is not. What you are seeing is the cooper plating missing due to damage and exposing the inner zinc. Don't guess what you think it is if you don't know. Ask first.
also: it is planchet not: Planchette: plan·chette /planˈSHet/ Learn to pronounce noun a small board supported on casters, typically heart-shaped and fitted with a vertical pencil, used for automatic writing and in seances. "the planchette jerked and skittered to the upper left-hand corner of the paper"
Welcome @dmrinbach. As stated, your first two coins can be explained as simple damage. The Lincoln/dime is another story. I'm surprised @paddyman98 didn't address it. I think that in order for it to be a double denomination, you need to show both sides and the edge. If you think about the minting process, a cent coin wouldn't fit into the dime collar, so if a struck dime were to make it into the cent die, the color should be consistently the cupro-nickel makeup with no copper color. Without any other indicators, it would have to be a post mint made item. A very interesting coin and great conversation starter. I'd certainly keep it, but as a real error, I don't think so, so NAV, no added value.
Thank you for pointing that out. The OP should have made it a lot clearer then. Him being new to this forum, I was trying to "help" the newbie, so made an assumption and assumptions are usually never a good thing.
Thanks, everyone for commenting on my coins. Let me start by apologizing for "PLANCHET" being misspelled. I should have told you all that I am part of the human race and not free from making mistakes. My situation forces me to use speech-to-text software to communicate, and sometimes words get past the spell check. Now back to CoinTalk. The 2012 D I had taken to the local jewelry store before I made this post and was told it was not Zinc, Aluminum, or Silver. So I assumed it was a cupronickel planchet. I was told he would have to have a piece scraped off or cut out to determine the alloy. 2012 D in pic 5 shows relief areas indicated by arrows. 2012 D in pic 4 shows it between a penny and a dime. 2012 D in pic 6 shows it next to a nickel. 2012 D in pic 9 on top a penny and pic 10 under a dime. I took a couple more pics of the 1971 D also... 1971 D in pic 11 shows it under a dime. 1971 D in pic 12 shows next to a dime. One more question from me and I'll get out of your hair. What is the name of the acid that can shrink a penny down to the size of a dime while leaving all the devices on the coin at the proper size? I want to add that photos are raw and not cropped or edited, in any way. Thanks
The person at the jewelry store is also part of the imperfect human race and is totally wrong. That's a copper plated zinc planchet with part of the plating taken off Leave it alone.. It's not a mint error of any kind.
We obviously can't point an XRF gun at the coin through the screen, so we can't measure the coin's composition. (I don't have my own XRF gun anyhow, more's the pity.) Here's what we can see, though: The coin's rim is mashed down into the devices, the rim is thicker than usual, and the diameter is smaller than usual. That says that the coin has been squeezed, either by rolling or by being forced into a collar. From your edge photos (which are quite good), I'd go with rolling. Look up "spooning" coins; it's a technique used when turning coins into rings. The coloring of this coin looks exactly like a zinc Lincoln cent that's had much of its copper layer abraded away. White in spots, grey where the zinc has corroded. The pattern of the grey areas on the obverse is a perfect little topographic map of the higher points on the coin's design, with the copper strip-mined away to reveal the zinc underneath. What did your jeweler do to test the coin's composition? If they were talking about scraping off a bit of it for testing, I assume they did not have an XRF tester. "Not zinc, aluminum, or silver" is an odd set of metals for a jeweler to list, though, and leaves me confused about what they actually did...?
