I'm not really a collecter just a fancier I guess. I have what appears to be a normal 1971 half dollar until one day I dropped it and it fell apart in half. When I picked it up the face on the inside is a 1974 20 Centavos piece is this common? Has anyone ever seen this before.
cool I have never heard of that before, I wonder what the story is behind the coin. That is deffinitely a conversation piece.
Fairly common - known as "magician's coins". Usually made by machining out everything inside the rim to one-half the thickness of a coin, and removing the rim and half the thickness of another coin, then putting the two pieces together. Careful examination will usually show a line around the inside of one rim, but when carefully made they can be hard to detect visually. The "ring" test is infallible - When dropped a short distance onto a hard surface, or carefully held by the edge and tapped with another coin or piece of metal, they "clunk". It's a much deader sound than even a clad coin makes. The majority of coins altered that way are two-headed or two-tailed, made with two of the same coin. Others are made with two different coins. Yours sounds like a hybrid, where someone used three coins, shaving the inside Kennedy slice even thinner than usual, and gluing it to the 20 centavos which had also been shaved considerably. The whole thing would be incredibly more complicated if the outer piece was mated to the Mexican coin. Do a forum search on "Magic" or "Magician" and you'll come up with several threads.
