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Message:: [QUOTE="900fine, post: 573000, member: 6036"]Well, here are some thoughts. These come from an amazing hour-long conversation about these 1834 JR-6 10c and Mint practices at the time. Apparently, the press operators attempted to repair the die. The best guess is they stopped the presses and removed the reverse die. The piece that was the cud part (STATES) was still present, but cracked away so that when the press came down with tons of force, the cud piece couldn't exert any force on the planchet ("retained cud"). Since they still had the cud fragment, they were able to strap a steel band around the die and drive a screw through the band into the cud fragment. This enabled the die to limp along just a little bit longer. =~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~ Some other ideas came from the discussion. These are conjecture. Tell me what you think of these : They had no more reverse dies. If they had one, they would have used it. Normally, press operators would not make such heroic efforts to repair such a bad die. This die had been in terminal state for some time. This is somewhat unusual; normally, they had spare dies for this reason. They were near the end of a quota of dimes, and there was "management pressure" to finish the production run. When they repaired this die, they knew it was doomed to fail entirely, and soon. If they were nowhere near the end of the quota, they would have retired this die rather than invest so much effort. Why waste time on a crappy die which won't finish the quota ? Let's just wait for a die with enough life to finish the job. Perhaps this is why they didn't have a spare reverse die lying around. Being near the end of a run, they were hoping they could "git 'er done" without having to make another die (which was costly). It is possible they had more than one minting press, and the they were different capacity (tons of force). If so, the smaller pressure press was used for dimes and other smaller coins. Dimes were lower priority than other coins. Large Cents and Half Dollars were the staple of commerce (there were no commercial silver $1s minted in 1834). If they had more than one press, the primary press probably had lengthy production runs of Large Cents or Halves.  The other press(es) had shorter runs of the other denominations (1/2c, h10c, 25c, $2.5, and $5, which had lower mintages - in 1834, the Mint cranked out 10 times as many 50c as dimes.) If true, this means the second press was more frequently stopped for changeover from one denomination to another. Of course, this happened in synch with planchet production. Presses were stopped at night and the dies removed. They didn't work 24 hrs/day, and they had to lock up the dies for security reasons. In the morning, they usually retrieved the same pair of dies, but not always.  This complicates things quite a bit when looking at the coins; we sometimes see a die marriage run for a while, one die drop out while the other keeps working, and then the original two marry up again. This fits nicely with the "night time die removal" theory and the "interrupted production run" theory for low-priority denominations like dimes. Since there are no surviving Mint records of die usage, all of this is deduced from the "fossil record" of the coins themselves, as indicated by die state deterioration.  And the best way to do that is at a Happening, when lots of specimens of a given die variety are brought together - by average guys like you and me ![/QUOTE]

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