Just want to rant a bit..... Personally, TPGS offering rewards for mint errors -should be made illegal- $10,000 is a TON of cash to tempt mint employees to intentionally make a lot of these slip ups, such as this. http://coins.about.com/b/2007/11/18/...ring-found.htm COME ON FOLKS, Lakewood CO is a Denver CO. suburb. Yeah I expect the occasional slip up. But for heaven sakes, the number of Presidential Dollars without edge lettering is too much to explain off on simple mistakes. Mint personnel can not be -that- inept. Sure you can try and ferret out the problems, but it's much easier to remove the temptation. Offering such premiums for mint errors just encourages this. It's definitely on shaky moral ground. And it just makes me abhor TPGs that much more. Bounty for Mint errors is definitely something that should be outlawed. Everyone may like the mint errors to collect, but personally. THEY ARE a black eye and an Embarrassment to the nation. Nuff for now. <engage satire>I think I may go burn some plastic slabs on the steps of PCGS in protest<end satire>
truth is... what most don't realise is that by merely the scale of what the mint produced that the number of errors is still a very small percentage.
Modern errors aren't that uncommon... it's just very rare for them to get out of the Mint, as quality control is fairly stringent. But mistakes can happen, and manage to get out of the Mint before they're caught. Remember the state quarter/Scagawea mule? It did get caught before it got out of the Mint... and they did melt all of them... or at least they thought they did... it turned out a few got missed and ended up outside the Mint, the first being discovered as change in a post office vending machine... so far I think 3 have been discovered. It does seem odd that this was found so quickly since the only business strikes of Scagaweas you can possibly get would be from Mint-sold bags and rolls... and its proximity to where it was minted does seem a tad suspicious lol... however this is more beleivably an "error" than say, the extra leaf Wisconsin quarters I think. They do use the same planchets after all. Question: Are the planchets lettered before or after being minted with the main design? Want to be able to picture the normal process and how this could end up getting lettered in error.
Presidential dollars are struck with plain (smooth) edges and then later the edge lettering is added.
Ah OK... so it should be theoretically possible for some struck Sacagaweas to get accidentally send to the lettering machince intended for president dollars, right?
According to reports it was found in a roll of Adams dollars. Which would make sense because in order to get the lettered edge the Sac dollar would have to be struck and then get stuck in one of the bins they use for transporting blanks and coins around in the mint. Then that bin was later used to transport struck Adams dollars from the press to the edge lettering machine and the sac dollar got mixed in with the Adams coins and then run through the lettering press. It would then get bagged in a ballistic bag with the rest of the coins. $10,000 sounds like a lot of money, but I wouldn't risk high fines, years in prison and a federal conviction on my record for a measly $10K. Especially considering the difficulty you would have trying to get the coin out of the mint a directed to an accomplice.
That makes sense. In order to manage to get lettering it would have to get mixed in with struck president dollars heading to the lettering machine. This is a believable accident... it would be hard to get away with this intentionally and even if you did it would be hard to insure it gets to you or an accomplice... and it's too much to risk just to get random errors out there. There have been suspicious cases though... the Wisconsin quarter stands out as a recent example... the 1913 Liberty nickels of course lol... but this error is fully believable as a legitimate accident, it wouldn't be that hard for it to happen accidentally, avoid notice, and manage its way out of the Mint. Well it's still highly unlikely of course, but has at least a measurable possibility and plausability. I'm willing to believe this as a legitimate error.
