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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;cladking, post: 1429714, member: 68&quot;]This gets very complicated.</p><p><br /></p><p>It&#039;s ironic that the coin in question is a 40% silver bicentennial&nbsp; Ike because this coin comes with two distinctly different types of business strikes.&nbsp; The one pictured is the more common one with the lower mintage!&nbsp; These were made to mint set standards and struck on numismatic presses.&nbsp; This means new dies, lower speeds, and higher tonnage.&nbsp; The scarcer version was run off on standard presses and dumped in 55 gal drums.&nbsp; They are poorly struck badly handled and most were melted back in 1981 because of very poor sales.&nbsp; Even the few that were sold were often melted so they aren&#039;t seen often.&nbsp; In theory a coin run off on a standard press can be as nice or nicer than one made on a mint set press but in practice it&#039;s very unusual and in some cases you can spot the difference on every single coin made.&nbsp; Most SMS coins look SMS and all high speed Ikes look like high speed Ikes&nbsp; while all numismatic Ikes look like numismatic Ikes.&nbsp; This isn&#039;t due to handling alone but to strike pressure.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>All coins are &quot;graded on the curve&quot;.&nbsp; This doesn&#039;t mean every date will have the same number of &quot;A&#039;s and &quot;F&#039;s, just that if there are no A&#039;s in a date and precious few B&#039;s or C&#039;s everything gets bumped up a little.&nbsp; Typical faults are especially overlooked.&nbsp; If it weren&#039;t for this there wouldn&#039;t even be any MS-64 &#039;82-P quarters.&nbsp; &#039;71 Ikes just don&#039;t come nice so to help fill the void at the high end a little some flaws will be overlooked or forgiven.&nbsp; A &#039;71 that looks like an MS-65 silver Ike would grade MS-68 with a star, a bean, a happy face, or anything else they&#039;re passing out right now.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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