Hey all you mint process pro's out there... Answer this for me... I went through some new presidential dollar rolls today and found a single coin with a backwards 'st' on the edge... Now I am of the impression that this is considered just a damaged coin, but the explanation that i have read is that the obverse or reverse of a coin can come in contact with the edge of another leaving the incused impression of the embossed letters... But how can the coins come into contact that HARD that it would leave a complete perfect 2 letters pressed into the edge of a coin... I read that the weight of the coins in large quantities creates a great deal of force, which I fully get, but if that is the cause as seems to be the consensus, then why haven't I found this type of damage by the thousands?.. I mean all the coins for circulation go into giant vats-o'-coins, do they not?.. And in these hoppers, wouldn't there be hundreds if not thousands near the bottom that would have similar errors?.. And if the weights involved in coin hoppers are so great, wouldn't there also be huge numbers of coins with obverse and/or reverse severely damaged by the edges of other coins?.. I don't know, I am just thinking there is something else to this... Any thoughts or ideas?.. I will get a picture of the coin later by the way...
Coin planchets are annealed prior to striking to soften them and even the striking process itself creates heat. Therefore, many things can occur immediately after the strike which will NOT occur once the coins have cooled.
I appreciate the response. So here are some questions I still have... Why don't we see the same types of errors in cents, 5 cents, or others. They all have the same process (more or less) for minting, they all go into giant hoppers. I have searched through hundreds of thousands of lincoln cents and have never seen the hint of a similar error on an edge. Also, if the hopper is so full of coins that the sheer weight of coinage is enough to impress the obverse lettering of a coin into the edge of another coin, then we should see bent coins, flattened coins and all other sorts of damage besides just an occasional incused letter, particularly if the coins are in a more softened (annealed) state... It just doesn't make sense... Also, only the coins on 'top' of a coin would add weight that would affect a coins ability to be pressed into another coin... The other coins in the hopper not directly above the coin in question would be no factor... If the hopper was 40 feet high (which it is not), it would still only add up to a couple dozen pounds of psi pressing on a given coin at the bottom... In my opinion, this has to be a machine-created damage, albeit after the strike... Clearly this coin came into contact with the obverse of another, but it wasn't just sitting at the bottom of a hopper when it happened... Thoughts?
I don't have a definitive answer for you except that folks don't usually concentrate on the edges of reeded coins or for that matter non-reeded coins such as nickels or cents.
Just an update... Looking through more rolls, I have found another damaged edge coin with a 14th star, but the 14th is raised.... I also found an actual error where 2 of the 10 star run are nearly touching, leaving a gap at the end of the run... I will keep it, but I tell you, it is simply a boring error to find... I hear the TPG's are grading them as edge-damaged which I consider inaccurate, but I am getting the impression that the quality-control on this aspect of the minting process was less than stellar...
We do see the same type of damage on other coins, we call them bag marks. On quarters, for example, we will sometimes see marks left by the reeded edges of other coins as they crash into one another after they are struck. One of the things that is different with the lettered edge coinage is that the letters on the coin's edge are recessed and they can act like a die. As the coins are passed through the edge lettering press, the edges can come in contact with each other. It is possible for the transfer of details to happen at that point in the process. Thanks, Bill
The coins where the spacing of the elements on the edge is shifted, is an actual error caused by a small amount of slippage as the coin passes through the edge lettering press.
