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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;KBBPLL, post: 26539924, member: 104064&quot;]I&#039;ve been laser focused on the 1899-1905 dimes but really haven&#039;t looked at many dates/mints outside of that. Browsing PCGS gallery and Heritage archives for 1907-O it&#039;s pretty easy to find poorly struck coins. For example <a href="https://coins.ha.com/itm/barber-dimes/1907-o-10c-ms64-pcgs-pcgs-population-47-40-ngc-census-33-36-cdn-380-whsle-bid-for-ngc-pcgs-ms64-mintage-5-058-000-from/a/1323-19091.s?ic4=GalleryView-Thumbnail-071515#" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://coins.ha.com/itm/barber-dimes/1907-o-10c-ms64-pcgs-pcgs-population-47-40-ngc-census-33-36-cdn-380-whsle-bid-for-ngc-pcgs-ms64-mintage-5-058-000-from/a/1323-19091.s?ic4=GalleryView-Thumbnail-071515#" rel="nofollow">https://coins.ha.com/itm/barber-dimes/1907-o-10c-ms64-pcgs-pcgs-population-47-40-ngc-census-33-36-cdn-380-whsle-bid-for-ngc-pcgs-ms64-mintage-5-058-000-from/a/1323-19091.s?ic4=GalleryView-Thumbnail-071515#</a>. Look at the reverse and see how flat the bow, corn and wheat kernels are. In general I get the impression that the machinery in New Orleans was held together with bailing wire. Mint letters in 1900 show them complaining about die life, Barber sent his chief coiner A.W. Downing there to see what the problem was, Downing reported that they weren&#039;t properly annealing the planchets and implied that their machinery was in a bad state of disrepair (said in the polite language of the time). </p><p><br /></p><p>I wouldn&#039;t be able to say if 1907-O was any better or worse than other years. I do think that in general the earlier authors like Lawrence suffered from small sample sizes, which is understandable. All they had to go on was their own collection, access to dealer inventory perhaps, and sparse poor images in auction catalogs. You can see it in for example 1903-S, where Lawrence says all come from the old reverse hub, and then that gets repeated all the way to the current Bowers Red Book. On PCGS coin facts for 1907-O, Ron Guth says &quot;In general, this date is well struck&quot;, so he&#039;s saying the opposite. Today we have the advantage of being able to look at thousands of good images of coins to verify this stuff. Getting it corrected out there in publication land is the hard part. </p><p><br /></p><p>I would say yours is pretty well-struck, especially the reverse. It has typical weakness in the hair above the forehead. The leaf veins, ribbon, corn and wheat detail is all there. Too bad about the cleaning but what can you do. It might not look that bad in hand. </p><p><br /></p><p>You&#039;re correct about not being able to judge anything from the pop reports. The 1907-O isn&#039;t worth the cost of submitting until you get into high AU grades. PCGS shows 18 in AU58, more than any of the lower grades. You can bet that there are way more lower grade survivors than AU58. I suspect for many of these dimes (probably the case with any coin) that once it circulated, it circulated a lot. You either pulled a good one out to collect, or you spent it.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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