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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Conder101, post: 3555113, member: 66&quot;]Back in the early years of the mint the dies were made to a large extent by hand.&nbsp; The Bust was a single punch and then the individual letters and digits of the date would be punched in by hand.&nbsp; On the reverse there were a few different wreath punches.&nbsp; The leaves, berries, berry stems and wreath stems were often added by hand.&nbsp; Then the lettering would be punched in by hand.&nbsp; With all this hand punching/finishing every die was different. (dies would also deteriorate in different ways, die cracks, cuds etc.)&nbsp; In 1798 though the mint conducted an experiment attempting to&nbsp; create rev dies using a hub that had the entire design and lettering in it.&nbsp; The last half of the 1798&#039;s, all the 1799&#039;s and 1800&#039;s were were made using this hub.&nbsp; Unfortunately the press they had was not powerful enough to completely sink the entire design and a fair amount of hand finishing had to be done to the dies (berries, stems, some repunching on the letters etc).&nbsp; All the different dies known so far have been identified and die pairings numbered.&nbsp; (On rare occasions a new die is discovered, last one was the rev of 1794 NC-10 in 1994)</p><p><br /></p><p>Study of the coins will allow you to identify differences.&nbsp; For example on Kanga&#039;s coin, there is a die gouge from the right wreath stem to the last A in AMERICA.&nbsp; That is a diagnostic feature of this rev.&nbsp; It was used paired with three different obverses to make S-182, 183, and 184.&nbsp; On the obv of Kangas coin you can see some die chips from the top left corner of the 7 toward the curls.&nbsp; That is diagnostic of that obv.&nbsp; That obv was also used with another rev to make S-185.</p><p><br /></p><p>One feature used to divide the 1798&#039;s into smaller groups is that part way through the year the Bust punch was replaced.&nbsp; On the first punch there is no curl above and left of the 1 in the date.&nbsp; The second punch does have a curl.&nbsp; Look at the coin posted by Eduard, it is the first punch, the other two in this thread are from the second punch.&nbsp; There were also two different sizes of 8 used on the 1798&#039;s.&nbsp; There is also a slight difference in the style of the lettering used this year.</p><p><br /></p><p>For examples of how hand finishing can differ on the reverses look at the right reverse stem and notice the differences in the spacing between the end of the stem and the leaf above it.&nbsp; Then there is the die gouge I mentioned earlier, an on Eduards coin notice the gravers scratch from the fraction bar to the right ribbon.&nbsp; All these little various things help to identify dies.&nbsp; And I haven&#039;t even mentioned all the die cracks seen on Eduards coin.&nbsp; That crack from the top of F to the rim is on ALL S-163&#039;s, it developed late in the reverses use on S-159.&nbsp; The other cracks quickly follow once it started striking the S-163.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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