Was wondering what makes a coin look like this I've seen a penny like this before. It has a wood grain look to the metal. It's on both sides just want to know what happened. It really looks like it was struck like this.
When the alloy was prepared the copper and nickel were not homogeneously mixed so some areas in the ingot were high in nickel content and some were low. When the ingot got rolled out these high and low area got stretched out into streaks in the strip (initially the strip may have visually looked perfectly normal). The strip was blanked, the blanks turned into planchets and the planchets into coins. But over time these streaks of different alloy content toned at different rates taking on the streaked or "woodgrained" appearance as on your coin.
