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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;BadThad, post: 3653664, member: 17261&quot;]The 82 series is the most interesting of the memorial generation. 7 coins were issued and over the decades I have developed my own theories as to why certain things happened during the transition from copper to copper-plated zinc. There is a dearth of information from &quot;official&quot; sources, quite sad actually, so all we can do is use reasoning and deduction.</p><p><br /></p><p>We see masses of 1982P copper cents because they were needed for commerce. All of the testing happened at the Philly mint. The small date came about for the zinc coins, the large date didn&#039;t work well with the new planchets. It also allowed the mint to tidy up the masters because they were getting worn out.</p><p><br /></p><p>I believe the P mint started a run with the new planchets and something went wrong. To meet production, they ran with the small date dies intended for the zinc planchets.....thus creating the variety. I believe this run, 1982P SDC, to be the lowest mintage of the 82 series because the mint solved the unknown issue and quickly switched back to zinc.</p><p><br /></p><p>Since Philly was the developer/guinea pig of the transition, I don&#039;t believe Denver had any problems and just transitioned straight from copper to zinc. However, they used up their supply of the large date dies (including a lot of copper cents) before transitioning to the small date dies late in the run. For this reason, I believe the 1982D SDZ to be the next lowest mintage.</p><p><br /></p><p>As for the 1982D small date copper - those are purely accidents (errors). There was bound to be a few copper planchets around as Denver produced billions of cents.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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