Any thoughts here would be great! the lettering on the side is cut off on some letters (you can only see half of "HALF") and there are lines like the die broke streaming from all the letters on the back like they are stretched...
As he mentioned in the OP, it is on the edge lettering. It is not unusual for the lettering to be slightly crooked.
This is from a worn die. The die hasn't broken, but it is late in its life. It is normal. The coin looks to have been cleaned, and has EF details. Whether it would get into a problem free slab or not (that is, the severity of the cleaning) is very hard to tell from these pictures.
If you do a search on CT you will find Bonedigger did a thread on edge lettering on CBH and their values. He has a link to all the known styles of lettering . Again when uploading images press full images
Hint at what? If it was a hint, it was way too subtle for me. Two options: 1. They don't know better. 2. They don't care.
Are these threads not permanently available in the searchable history? If it's worth mentioning, it's also worth showing.
Dude is struggling enough showing decent pics of the obverse and reverse. I can't expect him to take pics of the edge as well. That is truly challenging, and requires special equipment to do it right. Otherwise, you'll wind up taking 8 pics to show the whole edge. And, my point in my earlier post was that it really isn't worth mentioning. There is a tremendous amount of variation in the edge lettering. I've seen more mucked up edge lettering on these bust halves than I've seen correct. The idea was good, but the technology wasn't there yet.
A cleaned xf struck from very worn dies. The star points extending to the rim is a good sign of this. The lettering unevenness is from a weak strike at the edge. I'd suggest putting it in a Manila envelope for a couple years and hope it colors up because aside from the surfaces is a nice coin
