Is this some kind of way of marking dies?

OK, I'll do so tonight. Though one area is the eyes of the man in the design and you also circled the designers name. I have a contact in SA that said he looked at 35 of these over the weekend and only found the markings on 5 of the coins. But he said they were in differnet configurations on some of them.

 

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Thanks for continuing to look thru these. The 2 you have in turqoiuse are the eyes of the "generic man". Same as on the lizard, the cow and the eagle. Those are all incuse and appear on every coin. The 2 in the square are raised and have so far appeared on about 8 out 60 coins ive seen. Take a look at the proof version of this coin, it may serve as a reference for the design elements.

 

I think this picture shows the 2 dots in question the best as well. You can see they are raised and get a good perspective on the perfectness of the circular discs which lead me to believe they were designed. But again, about 1 in 10 or so of these coins show the discs with about 60 examined.

 

500k in silver for circ
20k in Bronze for circ
11k in copper as a pattern

Krause lists them like this but some collectors have expressed to me that they feel there are no seperate bronze and copper strikes that they are all bronze and that it is a pattern.

 

Lol, ok. So then we can label this one as an "unknown phenomenon". Thought maybe it was something commonly seen on other issues.

 

I suspect these may be the marks from a hardness test. Monitoring the hardness of the die metal would allow the mint to replace the die before it broke or re-anneal it to extend its life.

With a mintage of 500k, I'd guess there would be at minimum 3 die sets as dies for larger coins have a much shorter life than smaller coins. I found some die life figures online: 1971 US half dollar 150k strikes per die, dollar 100k strikes, cent 1,000k strikes per die.

The dots are in a recessed area which would be a high spot on the die. It's possible that the marks would be polished off the die, then when retested the marks would be in a slightly different location.

 

Interesting theory. On some coins there is only 1 of the dots so im curious if the tool is a single head hammer like device. If so the tester got them really parallel in this example. I thought that there would be at least a few dies because of the designs on this coin. The recessed fields kind makes it equivelant to a high relief example. I have read that the 1921 Highg relief Peace dollars were getting 25k strikes per die initially.

 

The tools I've seen are a single point.

 

If the previous pictures left any doubt at all that these are not fluke rust or other marks, I think this one will erase them completely. I nailed this pic.