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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Numbers, post: 347300, member: 11668&quot;]Yes, but let&#039;s not confuse modern notes with older ones while we&#039;re doing it.&nbsp; <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie6" alt=":cool:" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" /></p><p><br /></p><p>Plate numbers on modern notes come in two sizes, but they&#039;re not micro and macro--they&#039;re macro and huge.&nbsp; The huge size is used for the Fort Worth back plates, the macro size for everything else.</p><p><br /></p><p>Mules occurred back in the old days of the 1934 series, when the plate numbers were enlarged from micro to macro.&nbsp; The micro numbers are far smaller than any you&#039;ll see on modern notes; look at any Series 1928 or 1929 note for an example of micro.</p><p><br /></p><p>As the BEP was transitioning from the micro plates to the macro plates, they weren&#039;t careful about which face plates they used with which back plates.&nbsp; The result was mules--notes printed with a micro face and a macro back, or vice versa.</p><p><br /></p><p>In certain denominations and series, mules are very rare; in others they&#039;re common.&nbsp; (In the higher denominations, there are a few cases where every note in an entire series is a mule!)&nbsp; The earliest mules printed were in Series 1934; the latest in Series 1950 (though in the lower denominations they didn&#039;t persist for nearly that long).</p><p><br /></p><p>The term &quot;mule&quot; is also applied to a few similar transitional varieties in the large-size notes.&nbsp; In those cases, it was generally the location of the plate number that was changed, rather than its size.&nbsp; A note that has its face plate number <i>here</i> and its back plate number <i>there</i> is a mule; but you need a reference book to keep all the heres and theres straight.</p><p><br /></p><p>The term &quot;mule&quot; is also applied to some modern notes produced with back plates left over from an older series.&nbsp; In those cases, it&#039;s the plate numbers themselves that make the difference; the mule notes will have very low face plate numbers, but high back plate numbers.&nbsp; And again, you need a pretty thick book to tell you what &quot;low&quot; and &quot;high&quot; mean in each case.</p><p><br /></p><p>In each case, the key idea of a &quot;mule&quot; is that it&#039;s made from face and back plates from different eras.&nbsp; The face plate is a new plate and the back plate is an old plate (or vice versa), and some change in the way plates were made makes that distinction obvious on the note.</p><p><br /></p><p>Thus the Fort Worth 295 error is definitely not a mule, because it doesn&#039;t involve new/old plates.&nbsp; It&#039;s an engraving error, because plate 295 was incorrectly engraved with the wrong font size.&nbsp; The correct plate was used; the plate just has something wrong with it.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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