I was looking at this page talking about all the die problems with the 1999/2000 Canadian quarters: http://www.coinscan.com/mill/mm99.html So I thought I'd check mine, I only had 3 Dec 1999 quarters, here is the best and worst ones. The best part was the "December" and "1999" parts, the die was clearly not doing to well, looks like instead of taking it out of service they attempted to repair it, heres a few pics, I'll try for some better ones later.
more pics a better view? its hard to tell from the pictures, but holding the coin 2 feet from your face without a magnifying glass and you'd barely even see the difference.
Well Ive never worked at the RCM, but just from my own professional experience with dies and molds, it looks "repaired". See in these pictures, the 2nd one shows cracks/chips starting (in red), if you just left it, it would get a little worse with every coin that gets stamped, and you might get another couple hundred coins before its totally unusable. But if you repair it by linking the chips by reworking (grinding) the die, as shown in the 3rd picture, you might get a few thousand more. Kinda hard to explain, but I have built and repaired molds and dies professionally, I could photoshop some more pics to illustrate more, but hopefully this shows what I mean.
This is hypothetical, but realistic, keeping in mind they minted a different design every month for 2 years from 1999 - 2000, so it would be difficult to reasonably predict at what point, or where, the die will become to deteriorate. What happens sometimes, they guess theyre going to get 500,000 coins per die, and they need 10 million coins, so they get 20 dies. Now they actually start getting about 350,000 good coins per die. So they say, well lets push it and get it more like 400,000 even though some will look pretty bad. Now after after 15 dies have been gone through, and theres only 5 left, and you see theres no way you can make the order, the options are get/make new dies, or go through the ones that arent too bad, pick a few out, and repair and replate them, and put them back into production. A new die is the proper thing to do, but it costs a lot, and takes time. Resurfacing and replating a die can be done in a day, and can be put right back in to production almost immediately.
The appearance is so crude that it's hard to believe that it's retooling. No competent engraver would allow such poor workmanship to enter production. Also, these dies are chrome-plated, and any retooling would disrupt the chrome layer. I have never seen toolmarks (engraving tool scratches) on any such coins. On U.S. coins you can see similar distortion affecting letters and numbers that is simply the result of natural deterioration.
