1983 One Cent Error?

It could be argued that the receiving dept. accepted them so they are within tolerance, then again the same guy could have made a mistake.

 

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I am not sure, I have seen a few in slabs.
One of the top four. A 97D and a 98 together.
They have a unique look to them.

Thats cupro nickel The cents we are talking about are copper coated zinc.

I wish I knew. I have found oddly interesting yellows on other years also. Maybe if I come across them, I will take some photos. These cents are clearly not from heat or a high school science experiment.
The cents have a distinct yellowing to them and usually highly reflective surfaces.

 

The copper coated zinc cents will change color with heat too.

 

I've seen then slabbed as well. It may be ANACS, but I'm not certain. But how did they determine it was brass? Do they have someone with calibrated eyeballs? Do they have CIELAB color maps correlated to brass plating on cents? Or are they just making a BEST GUESS? Its a guess.

I'll swear up and down that I have a couple brass plated cents, but I have NO PROOF. I worked for a fortune 500 company that had over 1000 people working at their R&D campus. They had every type of analytical equipment you could imagine. But I couldn't get surface compositions unless we cut up the sample. It's easy if you cut up the sample, but doing non destructive testing? Not something I know of and my guess is ANACS doesn't know either.

 

Like I had said, in hand these cents have a distinct tone, and look.
I would send them in and see what they say.

 

I hear ya. I see them when they come out of the dryer. Iv'e never tried to bake a coin, so I don't fully know what they look like.

 

@Hommer
I new there was another link. There should be a few threads on CT besides the one I posted.

 

I remember finding a couple of "Yellow Jackets" as they were called back in 1996 or 1997. I think I still have one somewhere. I never took the time to weigh one. I remember seeing a few of them graded but don't remember what TPG it was. Back then I asked a very knowledgeable dealer and he told me it was done post mint. After several tries to reproduce it I could see there was a very good chance he was correct.

 

This is one I found roll hunting back in 96 or 97 it weighs 2.49

 

You should try cookin' up a batch, you get all sorts of pretty colors depending how long you cook em'.

 

This letter is imbedded in the link I posted earlier.

 

So, which coins With questionable color came from the mint with excess zinc in the plating, which ones were subjected to excess heat after the left the mint, and which suffered other types of environmental damage.

I would love to know what type of non destructive analytical test the mint did. It's interesting that they did not say what they used.

 

Maybe the best guess method?

 

I know you understand this, but it might be worth clarifying for others: we aren't talking about any kind of "experimental composition" where blanks were plated with brass instead of copper.

If you get a layer of copper over zinc hot enough, even though it's not hot enough to melt either metal, the zinc diffuses into the copper and turns it into brass (which is an alloy of copper and zinc). From the Mint letter above, this can also happen if too much zinc gets into the plating bath.

This migration can happen at any time, before or after the coin is struck. If you see it in a cent that's just come from a sealed Mint package, you can assume that it happened at the Mint (or at the blank manufacturer, which counts -- I mean, partial planchets have always been considered "mint errors", even if they happen before the blanks are delivered to the Mint). But if you find one in circulation, I don't think there's any way you could prove it's not PMD.

 

Interesting discussion on what I had wondered to be a lost Variety. Even if Vamsarockin says that you can tone a coin like a brassy planchet with heat,

There's definitively more to the story than that.

 

I've seen cents, plated zinc and solid copper alloy, heated with all sorts of things that tend to turn them all sorts a colors, but a homogeneous yellow was never one of them. I would like to see someone prove me wrong with a new coin not in the date ranges these have been identified in, please post before and after results.

 

For fun I just cooked a couple.
I did not get one to turn brass colored but got some different colors.
The bottom right one is the original uncooked color.
I don't have an exact or controlled method to be able to make the color I want.

 

If you just pop one into the oven, I'd expect oxidation to make it darker. It would be interesting to try it in an inert atmosphere. Or maybe under paraffin? Not sure if you could get it hot enough, but it might be worth a (careful!) try...

 

My photos are not posting