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HELP! 1956 wheat penny error!!! No reverse side
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<p>[QUOTE="lehmansterms, post: 4349081, member: 80804"]As for "Love Tokens" -</p><p>It was a common custom (mainly in the Victorian age) to have a jeweler plane-off one side of a coin (typically silver, but they exist on coins in gold and Æ alloys too) and engrave a name, initials, a date (birthdate, anniversary, etc.) and/or some endearance - often given as a keepsake/memento when someone close was going off to war or to sea, or as a memorial for someone dear who had passed, etc. I have also seen some highly elaborate engraving jobs including decorations and/or a scene like a ship or crossed swords. These were given to (or created for) loved ones as mementos/keepsakes. You find similarly altered coins from all over the world and going well back in history. The practice seems to have fallen out of vogue in the present day - or maybe it's because few jewelers are still able to do the fine engraving work necessary to create a "love token".</p><p><br /></p><p>I would like to suggest a different possible origin for this piece. 2.91g is a little light, but not much outside the "standard deviation" of weights for Æ cents - they can vary + or - 0.1 or 0.2g without being improbably light or heavy.</p><p>If, therefore, it wasn't planed or ground down to remove the struck details of the reverse there is a small chance that some misadjustment of the minting press was allowing more than one blank to be introduced between the dies, but still remaining within the collar. This would yield two single-sided coins - one just a reverse, one, like yours, just an obverse. Modern minting machinery turns out small struck coins like cents to the tune of hundreds per minute (rather like a machine gun) so the actual process is only able to be viewed via inspection of the results. Usually errors like this would be caught and pulled out of the stream, but the faster the machinery goes, the easier it is for "mistakes" to get by the inspectors watching the output stream of coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>A similar thing used to occasionally occur with hand-struck coins and dies. When a struck coin remained stuck to the upper (reverse) die, the minters might not notice it was stuck there. Then, after introducing another blank, the struck obverse of the previous (struck and stuck) coin acted as a die to impress a negative image of the obverse on the reverse of the second coin. This is called a brockage. This is a very clear example of a brockaged Roman era "Provincial" or local coin from a city.</p><p><img src="http://old.stoa.org/albums/album434/16_Philip_II_Brockage_2fer.sized.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /> </p><p><br /></p><p>Although I grew up basically "down the street" from the Philadelphia mint, I know somewhat more about the presumed details of ancient minting processes, so I don't really know from a practical standpoint how likely it may be for two blank planchets to be introduced and struck together. However, there are a number of other sorts of modern minting errors in which objects or whole additional coins/blanks wind up being "struck-through", the resulting error coins making it past the inspectors for collectors to discover.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>
[QUOTE="lehmansterms, post: 4349081, member: 80804"]As for "Love Tokens" - It was a common custom (mainly in the Victorian age) to have a jeweler plane-off one side of a coin (typically silver, but they exist on coins in gold and Æ alloys too) and engrave a name, initials, a date (birthdate, anniversary, etc.) and/or some endearance - often given as a keepsake/memento when someone close was going off to war or to sea, or as a memorial for someone dear who had passed, etc. I have also seen some highly elaborate engraving jobs including decorations and/or a scene like a ship or crossed swords. These were given to (or created for) loved ones as mementos/keepsakes. You find similarly altered coins from all over the world and going well back in history. The practice seems to have fallen out of vogue in the present day - or maybe it's because few jewelers are still able to do the fine engraving work necessary to create a "love token". I would like to suggest a different possible origin for this piece. 2.91g is a little light, but not much outside the "standard deviation" of weights for Æ cents - they can vary + or - 0.1 or 0.2g without being improbably light or heavy. If, therefore, it wasn't planed or ground down to remove the struck details of the reverse there is a small chance that some misadjustment of the minting press was allowing more than one blank to be introduced between the dies, but still remaining within the collar. This would yield two single-sided coins - one just a reverse, one, like yours, just an obverse. Modern minting machinery turns out small struck coins like cents to the tune of hundreds per minute (rather like a machine gun) so the actual process is only able to be viewed via inspection of the results. Usually errors like this would be caught and pulled out of the stream, but the faster the machinery goes, the easier it is for "mistakes" to get by the inspectors watching the output stream of coins. A similar thing used to occasionally occur with hand-struck coins and dies. When a struck coin remained stuck to the upper (reverse) die, the minters might not notice it was stuck there. Then, after introducing another blank, the struck obverse of the previous (struck and stuck) coin acted as a die to impress a negative image of the obverse on the reverse of the second coin. This is called a brockage. This is a very clear example of a brockaged Roman era "Provincial" or local coin from a city. [IMG]http://old.stoa.org/albums/album434/16_Philip_II_Brockage_2fer.sized.jpg[/IMG] Although I grew up basically "down the street" from the Philadelphia mint, I know somewhat more about the presumed details of ancient minting processes, so I don't really know from a practical standpoint how likely it may be for two blank planchets to be introduced and struck together. However, there are a number of other sorts of modern minting errors in which objects or whole additional coins/blanks wind up being "struck-through", the resulting error coins making it past the inspectors for collectors to discover.[/QUOTE]
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HELP! 1956 wheat penny error!!! No reverse side
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