Just in case you lay awake at nights wondering at how rim burrs happen...

Well, wonder no more. Start at the top. That picture is actually of a Kennedy Half that got whacked in a bank counting machine or a vending machine or some such machine like that. Imagine instead it's a planchet making its way to the coin press. That thing hanging on for dear life is the burr. The scene of the crime, i.e., where this happens, is the feeder mechanisms. In the case of rim burrs, as here, that's where the planchet is fed into the coin press. There's another feeder mechanism, the one which fed the blank into the upset mill, to make the planchet (i.e., impart the raised rim). That feeder mechanism wasn't the scene of this crime, as, were it, this coin's rim would be intact. Clever, huh, how they figure those things out? Anyway, look at the top picture and note how the rim of that coin is whacked. It's whacked in the bottom coin, too, although that's not as clear a picture of it. Imagine that burr in the top picture squished into the planchet to make the coin. That's the bottom picture. And, as they say, there you have it.

 

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Nice "before-and-after" images, given the constraint that none of us have a way to get actual before-and-afters on the same coin for something like this.

Actually, I guess @dcarr could do it as an experiment...?