I have had this unusual 1909 indian cent for a while now. It weighs 2.88 grams (under weight tolerance ) and has a really weird look for a cent. I thought at first maybe environmental damage but I have never seen another indian cent in any state look similar to it. It almost looks like some different kind of metal? I tried to see if a magnet will stick to it and it won't. The O.D. is 19.05 mm. I thought maybe counterfeit but this doesn't seem like a coin worth counterfeiting to me. Plus I don't see anything that screams counterfeit on the design other than the finish and weight. Anybody ever see another indian cent with this kind of look to it?
Could very well be a rolled-thin planchet, the thought occurred to me also. It's just crazy though... the unusual look of it is what led me to weigh it in the first place...
If I had to guess, mama sewn this one in her older daughters dress as a hem weigh. Definitely a Red head daughter with a lite dress... She got all the attention of the boys in overalls After numerous washings with lye soap? You have the result of the sun dress fabric holding the lye till it dried. Call it environmental damage, but that's a cool story.
Images taken with a scope can give you all kinds of looks. Lighting, focus, and contrast are tough to get correct when you get that close to a coin. Sometimes you can just back the scope away from the coin a bit and get better results.
You are right idhair, those weren't very good images. Maybe I had one too many glasses of scotch last night and my photography skills were tainted! Here's a few others.
Since the mint composition was 95% copper and 5% zinc and tin, and since all 3 are non-magnetic, even rare earth-magnets should not attract it.
That's a lot better! It doesn't look to me like a coin that lost weight due to etching. Thin planchet would be my next guess, although it certainly looks fully struck. Dumb question -- have you weight a few other barely-worn copper cents to make sure your balance isn't off?
I just weighed some other cents as well as some other coins and they are all close to spec well in tolerance so my scale is good and balanced. The reason I was testing with a magnet was to see if there was some different kind of metal due to it possibly being counterfeit or maybe some sort of error. It just looks weird for a cent. The texture of the fields looks kind of rough and not smooth like you would expect, and it is very uniform so that's what makes it even more puzzling. If it was environmental damage I would think it would be better/worse in different areas. It's the same all over the coin. The color is different in spots but the fields are the same texture everywhere.
