Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;SuperDave, post: 2345863, member: 1892&quot;]Let&#039;s imagine a die for a moment. In order for the coin to be struck as a positive, the raised features (the devices) on the coin have to be a negative on the die. A pair - obverse and reverse - is used for each strike. On them, the highest points are the fields, the flat parts of the coin. Now, very occasionally as the dies are coming together with tremendous force (on the order of 150 tons), one of the soon-to-be coins (planchets) fails to feed into the system to be struck. It&#039;s possible but not always, because care is usually taken to set a die depth enough to keep them from ever hitting each other. This is more or less successful for some designs than others, because no two coin designs present the same exact challenge to the minter. Each design &quot;fills&quot; (planchet metal flows like water during a strike) slightly differently and some require more persuasion than others - more pressure - to get a good strike. This has to be balanced by the need to preserve dies, so you&#039;re usually as conservative as you can be when deciding how to strike it.</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyway, sometimes a planchet doesn&#039;t get fed and they hit each other instead of it. In that case, the edges of the features (remember, the die is a negative, the edge where the feature starts falling off is what contacts first) get slammed into the other die hard enough to become semi-permanent. Those &quot;features&quot; then get struck into successive coins, causing clashing.</p><p><br /></p><p>For features like the letters on the Lincoln to be located where they are via clash, those letters first had to hit hard enough to clearly transfer their entire outlines (such as seen) to depth. And - visualize a die - they had to hit at a depth pretty darn difficult to *ever* hit in a clash, deep in the die, requiring some sort of catastrophic failure of both die and alignment at the same time pretty much unknown to modern numismatics because there&#039;s no way to make a full die get so off-kilter (only way to line those letters up in that spot) as to hit that deep. Just ain&#039;t possible.</p><p><br /></p><p>Have similar things happened? Sure; pieces of die can break off and then get clashed onto opposing dies. I can&#039;t see such a structure as imposed on your coin surviving that intact in a clash, without transferring other features which would have kept it in one piece long enough to clash.</p><p><br /></p><p>Do I know what caused your coin? Nope. There are numismatically-interesting possibilities as well as useless ones. All I&#039;m doing is explaining why I don&#039;t think it&#039;s a clash, at your request. And despite the firmness of my opinion, I&#039;m still only going with the preponderance of the evidence seen. More evidence = more thinking.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in