I'm going to try to post one coin each day about something fun. Feel free to add to the thread with something related. I don't remember the mint process for coins of this age. It's called an overdate. This is a 6/5. Maybe someone can teach us a bit. I don't know if this effect was caused by a date punch used on the die or if a new hub was involved with an old die. Did they use hubs in 1806?
I love these early coins; though a big budget stretch. Thanks for sharing. I have a 1798 Dollar which I really enjoy.
The early die making process did not use hubs as we traditional think of them. Dies were made using punches, jigs, hand engraving and such. Basically each individual die was a unique piece of art.
After the devices, letters, stars, numbers, etc. were punched into a die, the die would be heat treated to harden it so the die wouldn’t quickly wear out. Usually overdates are made from unused, unhardened dies, because it is a lot easier to overdate an unhardened die. To overdate a hardened die, the die would have to be heat treated to unhardened it, overdated, and then re-hardened. I can think of two cases (there may be others I don’t know of) of a hardened (used) die being overdated: 1806/5 quarter (the one above) and 1827/3/2 quarter. For the 1827/3/2, an unused 1822 die was overdated to 1823/2, hardened to strike <2000 coins, unhardened to overdate it to 1827/3/2, and re-hardened to make a couple dozen coins.
