I found this dime while looking through rolls to help my son fill his Whitman folder. It jumped right out at me and I wasn't looking for errors or anything. The letters on "Liberty" are really close to the edge. I compared it to another dime and there's definitely a difference, particularly toward the Y. I'm not sure if you can tell from the photo but in hand you can see an immediate difference. Is this anything as far as something people would collect? I don't normally look for errors/varieties so I don't know.
Dimes are very small and the slightest shift in the position when striking will cause a misaligned die strike. Unless it is very large, noticeable or off center, it's very common and not worth more than face value.
But it’s really amazing on such a small coin how detailed it is. There are some out there off centered more but yes it’s common for these.
Great eye, but it's normal for the date. I think it jumped out at you because finding such an old dime in such great condition is becoming almost impossible. The typical '80-D is F- to VF+ and they are covered in scratches and many are culls. This coin appears to have sat in mint set packaging until the last year or two. it still even has the mint set haze on it which is likely why it was spent.
Thanks. Yeah, it does look pretty nice. As I said, we've been looking through rolls to fill his folders. First pennies, then nickels and now dimes. I've never done this before and it's a lot of fun. I'm sometimes surprised at some of the really nice older coins we see.
Up until 1999 there were lots of outliers like this. Even though "every" 1969 quarter was worn down to F it was still possible to find an AU. But this has been getting much less common. Not only are the quarters worn to VG now but outliers are virtually never seen and will just be VF when they are. This is obviously being caused by collectors seeking nice examples for sets. Enough coins are being removed that scarcer dates show up less often even in typical condition. Outliers in cents and nickels are still found quite a bit for a very simple reason; most are coming from BU rolls but since there are no BU rolls of clads these are coming from mint sets. Most mint sets are gone now and most of the rest are tarnished. We're already to the point with clads that there are few collections, no BU rolls, and the mint sets are nearly gone. There are only about 35 million '69 quarters left in circulation and almost all of the are in G+ to VG+ condition except 95% are scratched up and 40% are otherwise culls. This leaves about a million attractive coins all in low grade. It's strange that people don't even notice. Clads were only designed to last 30 years in circulation and the oldest are more than double that now. Every day more and more of these old coins are being scratched up, lost, or melted by the FED. The mid-date dimes ('76 - '84) are among the most interesting of moderns because they are among the most overlooked and underappreciated.
You said "melted by the Fed." So do they take old coins out of circulation and melt them? If so, what's their criteria for doing that? I often wondered what happens to the old coins that they need to keep making 5 billion pennies every year. They can't all be lost in the snow. We are still finding a lot of older nickels in our roll searches. Maybe not always in great shape, but I have a pile of 1940 and 41, and coins from the 60s and 70s are not uncommon at all. The nickels seem to hold up better than some of the other coins in my observation.
Fed melting is mostly a very new phenomenon and I don't have confirmation yet. That it exists is the only way to explain the disappearance of very low grade, heavily worn, clad. It appears to have begun around 2008. I suspect it was instituted because so many coins were getting too thin to operate machines. Many coins now days are "counted" by weight so batches with mostly new coin would be undercounted. The FED has been melting some coin since the very beginning in 1965 but most of them were coins that were retrieved from municipal incinerators or bulldozed out of Niagara Falls or the like. Culls and worn coins simply accumulated in circulation until someone got so frustrated they tossed it in the trash. If quarters go through counting machines reliably they will not be removed however I believe they are running some separators to pull out very worn coins even though they will work in counters. I just don't see any AG's any longer. Bent and gouged coins are far less common. Any method to remove worn coins is likely to remove some coins with significant edge deformities. About 65% of the oldest dimes and 55% of quarters are simply gone though few of these were worn to AG and melted by the FED. Most of the missing coins were simply burned up in fires, strewn on the earth and in garbage dumps, or buried in floods. The rate at which the old clad is disappearing is increasing rapidly because of the many forces working against them. In less than ten years I expect there will be no more '60's clads in circulation except the occasional cull.
