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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;900fine, post: 785406, member: 6036&quot;]No, but specialists are very interested in such things.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Basically, specialists round up every specimen of a given issue they can find and try to find every &quot;die state&quot; they can. </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>For instance, get all the 1943-P 5c you can find and examine &#039;em. What you&#039;ll find is some coins have the die crack and some don&#039;t. Some have a small die crack, while on others it&#039;s larger. It&#039;s obvious which coins were made first - the ones with no die cracks. Clearly, the coins with worst die cracks were made last.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>At that point, they assign various &quot;die states&quot; to the coins - die state I is earliest &quot;perfect&quot; dies, die state II is the first obvious imperfections, etc. Finally, we have &quot;terminal die state&quot; - when the die is on the verge of total failure.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>It&#039;s really cool to lay out all the coins in order and watch the die state progression - the deterioration of the die.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>For these reasons, some people collect die states. They don&#039;t collect just by date or variety, they collect all die states of a given variety. Very educational.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Modern coins have far fewer &quot;die states&quot; than older ones. Modern coins almost never show outright &quot;terminal die state&quot;. What does that tell us about the early days of the US Mint ?[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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