sandwich penny

Jim as you already know some error coins are near impossible to identify from just looking at photos. from what I can gather from the photos is that this coin looks to have been a cent struck on a dime planchet and someone may have soaked it in acid trying to find out what it was.

this coin looks to me to be about the same as the clad coins that have been acid treated. whatever I say on here is just my opinion because photos are not like having a coin in hand to examine.

 

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What I appreciate is that N Stansbury posted a picture with two coins, the coin in question and a cent side by side. Clearly it shows the two coins are the same size in diameter. A dime will fit inside the rim of a cent.

 

Yes you are correct but you are forgetting that when a dime planchet is struck by cent dies the dime planchet flares out to the exact diameter of a cent.

there is no way that any of us on this forum can say for sure what the op has here by just looking at the photos . anyway some of us older folks can't see anything anyway.

it's even possible this old coin could be a metal detector find and maybe the original copper plating rotted off the obverse and reverse and remained on the edge somehow. someone on here called this a plated coin , I would have said unplated because if it is a normal damaged cent the copper plating is gone.

 

http://coinauctionshelp.com/wrongplanchetminterror.html

 

good link rockdude , I have visited this site many times. as you can see in the photos a dime planchet gets to cent size when struck with cent dies because the dime planchet is not retained by the cent retaining collar.

 

Yes, but I also adhere to the old saying , if you hear hoofbeats, think of horses rather than zebras. I din't use the adjectives you did, but I imagine that for every cent on a dime planchet there are hundreds or thousands of cents that have been "zinc" treated by chemlab experiments. IMO.

 

I heard hoofbeats last Sunday morning and a big 12 point point buck nearly ran me over. LOL
I never could understand why anyone would want to treat a cent with a zinc coating , I suppose they have their own reasons. if someone wants a zinc cent it would probably be easier to remove the thin copper plating with a acid solution to reveal the solid zinc cent. IMO.

not long ago I had some junk steel cents and some nasty looking copper cents and put them together in a cleaning solution I made up with different acids trying to clean them. after a few hours I removed them from the solution and the steel cents had a nice shiny copper plating on them from the copper off the copper cents . coins have always been experimented with in many different ways.

doing experiments can sometimes help us to learn how to identify fake and altered coins.

 

Now that I see the pictures, poor as they may be, it's just a galvanized cent.





























As far as the possibility of cent on die, we haven't heard from Redwin yet.

 

I can ASSURE you this is NOT a cent on dime. I see cents like this all the time and it isn't even from the highschool experiment. Its just a badly corroded, zinc-rotting 1989 cent that was possibly left in the rain in an oil puddle in a parking lot somewhere for a few days.
Ironically enough, I'd say way over half the ones I see like this are '89's. Must've had a bad batch that year or something.

 

Wouldn't the thickness be significantly impacted when a cent is struck on a dime planchet? The coin shown looks the same thickness as the cent.

 

Yes a cent is thicker than a dime planchet. if the op would put the coins together and get a photo of the edge of them we could see if one is thinner or not. if this coin has a solid copper core then it definately is on a dime planchet , if not then it is just a rotten zinc cent with the copper plating missing. in my first posts I was just going by where the op said the coin had copper in the center of the edge of it making it look like a sandwich.

 

Why not simply weigh the coin and end the speculation? Weigh it and get this over with.

 

It is over!

 

you are correct rockdude . the op appears to have lost interest in finding out what they have , I'm beginning to believe the coin does not have a copper center. either way no harm done to anyone.

 

Usually close to the diameter of the cent. And it tends to expand slightly more in the center layer than the outer ones. Because the Coppernickel is harder and frankly when you compress the top and bottom of a cylinder it theds to bulge in the center. The OP coin though shows the outer layers extending out further, the opposite of what would be expected.

If the other copper layer was removed on both sides mechanically or abrasively it could give you this appearance, dull silvery on the two faces, possibly with metal pushed out past the normal diameter, but the copper plating on the edge remaining. that would give it the sandwich appearance.