Last week my daughter found a Lincoln Cent that has a date of 197_. You can barely make out the missing 7. Has anyone seen one of these?
Howdy boogalloo - Welcome to the Forum !! This is what is known as a filled die error. This type of error is quite common and has no value.
It's amazing what can happen when so many coins are minted. Here in Australia with smaller numbers of coins minted an error like this would be hunted down by collectors and tucked away. On US coins what % of a coin would need to be filled before it's classed as a collectible error and be worth something?
Do you realize that what we are talking about is a coin that is struck with a die that happened to have a bit of grease or dirt get stuck on the die which prevented the digit or letter from being formed on the coin ? Perhaps you do realize it - but here in the US, such coins are almost as common as those without this type of error. They are so common in fact that even the US Mint ignores them - and they go to extreme lengths to stop any error coin from being released into circulation. Even so, these errors are still collectible and many do collect them. They just aren't valuable. Of course it wasn't so many years ago that no error coin was considered valuable - with very few exceptions.
Yes i realise it's from grease filling the digit etc from being struck up on the coin. This type of thing on Australian coins is rather rare where a full digit or letter is missing due to die fill. Our mintage figures though would be part of the reason. eg. 2000 $1 where demand should be high for circulating coins due to the Sydney Olympics only had a mintage of 7.592m coins. One coin only has been reported with the complete date missing due to die fill. Also amongst that mintage the Royal Australian Mint managed to mint a mule $1 which has the obverse for the 10c. An image has been put in the mule thread in the World and Ancient coins forum if you would like to check it out Error coins here have only just taken off again in the past 12 months. Back when we went decimal they were all the rage and people were collecting what they thought were valuable errors to find they were worthless. This set back variety and error collecting here alot and it's good to see them being revived with alot of hard work by some. Some of us here helping out others with learning about different types of errors keep a copy of Alan Herberts book next to our pc and find it's a must have reference even though it's based on US coins. We just ignore the price guide part because of different rarity levels here due to mintage figures.
Interesting - I'm not an error collector myself. Thank God !! I have a hard enough time with what I do collect I have a collector friend or two down under, but never talked to them much about errors there. Reckon I'll have to ask now
Error collecting is the easiest way to stay poor but i loves me errors There's a chance your friends down under could be members of my forum in the sig line but if their not they are welcome to join in as is anyone else
