New to this so bear with me. We found a 1965 quarter that looks fake. It weighs 4 grams, has a depressed gap around the edge. It is like two sides were glued to a small center piece or that the rim along the edge wasn't included. Is this fake or worth something? Thanks for any input.
I may be wrong, but with the surface damage and the copper loss in the center, looks like it was soaked in a medium strength acid. Not strong enough to eat the whole sandwich, but strong enough to eat out the filling.
I agree that it is likely PMD. It looks like someone used it as a science experiment. Try it in a vending machine and see if it works. TC
I ran into one of those recently. My kid found it. I tried to pry it apart with my pocket knife, but no luck. I figured someone used a shop tool to create the channel so they could make a pulley mechanism for a school project or maybe to tie a fishing line around to drop into a coke machine for retrieval. The environmental damage explanation could make sense too.
Looks like coins i find with my metal detector. Here are some examples next to normal coins. Coins left in the ground usually get dark looking. Plus it depends on long coins are in the ground and the type of soil its in. My own thought is take a wire brush to it and try the vending machine trick to see it works. If it takes then its real. Snowman
An EXTENDED soaking in vinegar will do the trick. The acetic acid attacks the copper more readily than the coppernickel alloy. If you lok closely at the copper down in the channel, you will find that it still shows the reeded edge.
Wow! Someone is quite skillful with a power tool of some sort to put a canyon along the edge like that.
Agreed. Probably something corrosive worked it over. Something with more affinity for copper than the CuNi cladding. If nothing else was said and I only had the edge view to go by I might have guessed it was a British Commonwealth coin. Many places (Hong Kong for instance) used the "security groove" rather than reeding to help prevent coin shaving.
