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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;cpm9ball, post: 2679815, member: 24633&quot;]Okay, I apologize for the crack about your age. It&#039;s just that I don&#039;t believe that you&#039;ve opened your mind to any other possibility. It happens a lot.</p><p><br /></p><p>I first noticed this anomaly back in 2005, and I believe I mentioned it on the NGC forums about that time. It didn&#039;t make a big difference because these were uncirculated coins that nobody would want. I just put them back into circulation. I didn&#039;t find it on just SQ&#039;s, but Kennedy half dollars as well. The only difference was that the quarters were produced for circulation, and the half dollars were strictly NIFC by that time. There weren&#039;t as many bags of the half dollars produced, if at all.</p><p><br /></p><p>I think one of the other problems that you&#039;ve neglected to grasp is that the method of manufacturing the SMS dies was not so simple. The Mint had to use <b>very, very fine</b> granules of sand and <b>very tiny</b> glass beads to create the finish. It was so complicated that the Mint had to delay the release of the first 2005 Satin Mint Sets until the middle of the year because they just couldn&#039;t get it right.</p><p><br /></p><p>You also stated that you didn&#039;t think they made that many dies for the SMS sets. Production of these sets ranged from a low of 580K to a high of 1.1M sets. Multiply those numbers by 5x for the obverse of the SQ&#039;s! They required special handling not too much different from that used for packaging the proof sets. It&#039;s not like they were striking tens upon tens of thousands of coins from one set of dies.</p><p><br /></p><p>Nope, the fragile nature of the production process for the SMS dies and the production of the coins caused these special dies to fail rather quickly, not like a die cracking, but simply from the finish disintegrating in bits and pieces, particularly in the fields. Like I said, the Mint realized they could still use them for thousands and thousands of additional business strikes simply by lightly polishing some of the die surfaces.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now, lets get back to the theory that you absolutely refuse to debunk and that is that the anomaly is a strikethrough. First of all, a strikethrough is a one-time occurrence. I believe in one of your links, more than one coin is shown with the <b>exact same</b> anomaly. How could this possibly be a strikethrough? Furthermore, a strikethrough causes a slight recess in the coin. Die polishing produces an effect just the opposite - a raised area on the coin - no matter how slight it may be. Last, and most importantly, at least one of the images from your links shows an area considerably larger than the horse and rider. How can a strikethrough built up from grease and debris in one of the devices be larger than the device, itself?</p><p><br /></p><p>Like I said, I found hundreds upon hundreds of these coins from year to year, 2005-2008. I also examined many of them under my stereomicroscope, and it wasn&#039;t hard for me to conclude that these anomalies produced on business strike coins were the result of the Mint using worn SMS dies rather than just destroying them.</p><p><br /></p><p>Chris[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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