I'm not a coin collector, but I recently got a 1964 penny in my change that has me curious. I hope someone here can help me figure out what's going on with it. Unfortunately I don't have a scanner to show you a photo of it. The coin is very very thin -- probably about 1/4 the thickness of the regular coin, with no rim around the outside. It does have printing on both the front and the back like a regular coin though, so I know it hasn't been somehow sliced through to make it thinner. Lincoln's portrait on the front seems to stand up more from the background than on my comparison coins, as does the memorial on the back, and they seem to be adequately detailed; the finer details like the date and words however are very worn down and a little blurry. Maybe that would be expected from a coin of this age, I don't know. Is this an example of something going wrong in manufacturing? (Although I think they would have noticed if their metal was rolled too thin.) Any ideas? C.
Sounds like you've got an "acid job". The cent was dipped in acid or some other corrosive liquid. A complete, but uniformly fuzzy design is characteristic of such alterations. So too is a diameter slightly smaller than normal.
