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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;BooksB4Coins, post: 2798357, member: 36230&quot;]It is sometimes easy to forget that those less familiar with dies may not be able to understand or relate to what&#039;s being said when mentioning or writing of them, so perhaps consider this...</p><p><br /></p><p>If you&#039;ve some play dough or maybe hot glue (or the like) around the house, take a meaningless coin, say a 1964-D cent, and if using play dough, make a ball slightly larger than the coin&#039;s diameter, making sure it&#039;s very smooth (no ridges, etc). Now, slowly and carefully press the coin into it. If using hot glue, take the coin and set it on some sort of hard surface that won&#039;t be damaged by it. Now, put the glue through the gun and slowly cover the coin. Regardless of the method used (there are plenty of others), now slowly peel the coin away from whatever you used and look at the &quot;impression&quot; it&#039;s left behind. No, this isn&#039;t as exacting as a die, but if done correctly, what you should see is an exact negative of the coin used, and mimics what an actual die looks like.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now, the point behind using a 64-D cent as an example is that the mintmarks were hand punched at that time, and generally speaking means you couldn&#039;t take any other cent of the same date/mint, place it on your negative, and have an exact match unless it was produced from the same die. This, in its most rudimentary form, is why a coin does need to be &quot;100% like them&quot; in order to be the variety.</p><p><br /></p><p>While somewhat on the subject of mintmark locations, take a moment to very closely compare yours to the photos Tyler posted; do you see the ever so slight difference in positions? This is absolute proof your coin was not produced by the same die, and means it cannot be the same variety. While this isn&#039;t something that can be used for any potential variety, it is a good tool for those with hand-punched mintmarks. </p><p><br /></p><p>With the understanding that this is a rather uncommon approach, I do hope it helps you better understand.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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