Ya know, I've always been a little intrigued by US gold dollars. When I was a little kid, there was a rumor that my great aunt had one from pocket change (she was born in 1890, the year after they stopped being minted). I never found out if it she actually had one or not. Anyway, I have a few gold dollars and have gazed upon hundreds. There's one thing I'm seeing : These things have more die clashing than any other denomination. Very conspicuous, obvious die clashing. Is that just me, or is it true ? If so, why do gold dollars show so much die clashing ?
The three cent silvers also show a tremendous number of die clashes as well. I would suspect that the reason for the clashes is twofold. One the extremelight weight and size of the coin created a lot of handling problems trying to get the planchets to feed properly. That resulted in a lot of misfeeds which allowed the dies to clash. Secondly because of the thinness of the planchets they used a higher than normal pressure for striking inorder to try and get the design struck up from the thin planchet. This high pressure resulted in greater damage to the dies when they did clash. So the dies would be more likely to show clashmarks than other denominations.
That makes a lot of sense. It certainly explains why so many G$1s have poor strikes. The series lasted 41 years; I'm surprised they lasted that long.
