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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;howards, post: 2508079, member: 299&quot;]We are getting hung up on labels somewhat.&nbsp; I think my use of the word &quot;fatigue&quot; is causing some of that because it appears that you are correlating fatigue with length of service of the die.&nbsp; Also, your use of &quot;deterioration&quot; further confuses the issue.&nbsp; This is not gradual deterioration I&#039;m talking about.&nbsp; Let&#039;s just try to talk about the process and forget about a good name for it for the moment.</p><p><br /></p><p>The mint had tremendous difficulty striking shield nickels. Dies were poorly prepared, and the hard and thick planchets caused extra stress on the dies.&nbsp; One of the points at which this extra stress particularly manifests itself is along the edge of devices.&nbsp; A device is a hole in a die.&nbsp; Hard metal planchets being forced into these holes caused stress on the edge of the holes.&nbsp; This stress caused failures in the die along the edge of holes, manifesting as spikes such as we see on the coin in question here.</p><p><br /></p><p>The reason you don&#039;t see this commonly on other series is that there is no other series that combines extra thick and hard planchets with poorly prepared dies.&nbsp; Remember that the mint had almost no experience with planchets of the nickel composition (75% copper, 25% nickel).&nbsp; The only previous experience with planchets of this composition was the 3-cent nickel, starting one year earlier than shield nickels.&nbsp; But the 3-cent nickel was a much thinner and smaller planchet, and did not cause the same kind of trouble for the mint.</p><p><br /></p><p>(Couple asides for other readers: 1) The reason for the use of such hard planchets was that Joseph Wharton (of Wharton Business School fame) had lots of friends in Congress, and Wharton owned a nickel mine.&nbsp; 2) The difficulties with shield nickel dies are also manifested in the huge number of varieties (due to hastily prepared dies), and the frequency of die cracks/breaks on shield nickels.)</p><p><br /></p><p>It is quite possible that die spikes similar to the coin in question could happen on fresh dies.&nbsp; Die cracks formed on very early die stages - no reason these spikes could not as well.</p><p><br /></p><p>I don&#039;t know what you mean by &quot;spikes most go in the direction of the radials.&quot;&nbsp; To clarify further, I don&#039;t know what you mean by radials, don&#039;t know what direction they would take, and therefore don&#039;t understand any connection to these die spikes.</p><p><br /></p><p>I also can&#039;t see any reason to call these spikes &quot;tooling.&quot;&nbsp; Tooling (at least to me) implies deliberate manipulation of the die by mint workers, and I can&#039;t imagine any reason for deliberately introducing spikes.</p><p><br /></p><p>Fletcher calls some die features &quot;die gouges,&quot; and I agree with him on those dies where he calls that out (example: 1874 F-05).&nbsp; I don&#039;t recall anywhere in Fletcher where he addresses spikes emanating from devices as die gouges (if you have a place, please point me to it - Fletcher is not easy to search for something like that).[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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