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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Conder101, post: 376965, member: 66&quot;]Amazing, you&#039;ve discovered the first 12 star C-2 with 13 stars.&nbsp; Actually it is a C-3 but that doesn&#039;t affect the discussion.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>The dies are almost without exception NEVER repunched after they are hardened and put into production.&nbsp; I can only think of three cases where it was done.&nbsp; The 1806/5 quarter, 1806/5 half dollar, and one of the five 1/000 cent reverses which produced the 1801 NC-3 variety, then later was corrected to produce the 1803 S-249 variety with the &quot;corrected&quot; fraction.&nbsp; The dies often failed during the hardening process and a die that had gone through the process once already, then been used in production typically had so many internal stresses that it just couldn&#039;t survive the annealing and rehardening process without either going to pieces of failing prematurely when put back into use.&nbsp; Any actual repunching you see on the early coins was repunching done to strengthen the details BEFORE the die was ever used.&nbsp; (This includes all of the other pre 20th century overdates.&nbsp; They are all examples of a new date being punched into an unused die that had not been previously hardened.)</p><p><br /></p><p>And as for repunching with and without doubling, if we are talking about an early die state and it shows repunching ie: a doubled impression we simply say it is repunched.&nbsp; If it doesn&#039;t show any evidence of repunching, then we don&#039;t know that it was repunched so naturally we don&#039;t say anything about it.&nbsp; (saying repunched with doubling would be redundant)&nbsp; In later die states as the die wears and the doubled impression wears away we say &quot;repunching fades&quot;.&nbsp; This lets the collector know that this area was originally repunched but the repunching is no longer visible.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Yes the wreath was an individual punch that was forced into the die using the screw press. (too large to be driving in by hand with a hammer.)&nbsp; The mint had made several attempts in the past to create entire dies by hubbing the whole design at one time (a couple of the 1794 half cent rev dies, a couple 93/94 large cent rev dies, the last third of the 1798 cent rev dies and all of the 1800 rev dies)&nbsp; But these were generally failures because so many of the low relief details didn&#039;t come up and had to be added by hand to each die that it really didn&#039;t save any time.&nbsp; The Mint didn&#039;t get around to successfully creating full dies by hubbing until the late 1830&#039;s early 1840&#039;s.&nbsp; Even with just punching the wreath by itself they still sometimes needed to do some hand strengthening of some features, add stems to berries or leaves etc and sometime the graver would slip.&nbsp; This is probably the cause of the varieous spikes.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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