I am currently looking for a nice cutting error but I am having trouble figuring out how to verify what the serial numbers should be. I am trying to figure out exactly how different adjacent serial numbers should be. How different should the serial numbers of two horizontally adjacent bills be? How different should the serial numbers of two vertically adjacent bills be? For example, recently on ebay I was watching an auction for an error cut bill where the cut was off vertically and one bill ended in 78911 and the other ended in 96911. I know the last numbers matching was right but the fact that the two numbers before that being 18 different did not make sense to me.
There's a lot of block info on this site USPaperMoney.info and a contributor of that site is a member here, NUMBERS, whom you may look up or wait until he finds this thread.
First of all, if you're looking for a cutting error of that sort, you need to be aware that the *great* majority of those found on Ebay are artificial. That is, somebody bought an uncut sheet of currency from the BEP, and chopped it up funny with a paper cutter. The results look pretty cool, but they're not really error notes, and they're not worth anywhere near the prices of actual cutting errors. (Though if you want to pay a few bucks for one just to impress your friends with it, go for it.) Nearly all of the uncut sheets sold this way have very high serial numbers (over 96000000, and most often over 99000000). These days, currency printed for circulation only uses serial numbers up to 96000000 (except for $50's and $100's, which go to 99200000). That's a quick way to evaluate whether or not a "cutting error" is likely to be legitimate. The BEP prints these uncut sheets in all sorts of odd run lengths, so the difference between adjacent serials on the sheet can be just about anything. Your example of 18,000 is particularly odd, though: I'm going to guess that that note was a 2006 $1 in the C..A block, since that's the only sheet printing I know of that's used a skip of 18,000 serials between positions. (See here for what I know on the sheet printings; some of it's still a bit fuzzy at the edges....) Currency printed for circulation, on the other hand, is produced in standard runs of 200,000 sheets nowadays, so serial numbers from consecutive positions would differ by 200,000. (Again, the $50's and $100's are different; they go by 100,000.) The standard print runs have gotten larger every decade or two, though; in the past, we've seen standard runs of 40,000 sheets, 20,000 sheets, and 8000 sheets at various times for various denominations. Things get even more complicated if you want to think about star notes, since those are often printed in irregular partial runs anyway. But I suspect I've already given you substantially more information than you really wanted, so I'll stop there....
So the numbers should usually be different by 200,000, is this horizontally or vertically? If a bill ended in 100000 the one to the right would end in what number? 300000? What about the one below it? I am aware of the artificial errors and I would prefer to avoid them, so thanks.
Depends on exactly where on the sheet the bills are coming from. The order of the plate positions is a little odd; they don't just run down one column after the next. For example, the first sheet would be laid out like this: 00000001 00800001 03200001 04000001 00200001 01000001 03400001 04200001 00400001 01200001 03600001 04400001 00600001 01400001 03800001 04600001 01600001 02400001 04800001 05600001 01800001 02600001 05000001 05800001 02000001 02800001 05200001 06000001 02200001 03000001 05400001 06200001 The numbering covers one quadrant of the sheet at a time, before moving on to the next quadrant. Within each quadrant, vertically adjacent notes differ by 200,000, and horizontally adjacent notes differ by 800,000. But if you're crossing the boundary between quadrants, then vertically adjacent notes differ by 1,000,000, and horizontally adjacent notes differ by 2,400,000. More generally, in a print run of N sheets, vertically adjacent notes will differ by either N or 5N, while horizontally adjacent notes will differ by either 4N or 12N.
