Going painstakingly through a box of pennies from the bank and this one popped out at me so I thought I'd put it up here for a few opinions. As you can see, the metal is raised along the outside of the D and not depressed. I cannot find this listed anywhere in Wexler or the penny website.
Well, shucks!! Thanks for the explanation. I guess I'll just throw it back into the mix and maybe some other person will find it some day and think he hit the jackpot.
That hardly looks like plate splitting. It looks like something foreign sliced into the 9 and 8. The areas pointed to look more like changes in the field.
I would say more pennies have a split there than don't. For whatever reason the plating on the east side of the D mint mark often has a little split where the copper separates from the zinc. It starts to rot and it turns into a black line along the edge which can look like a doubling of sorts.
Looking back at the first photo, why do the numbers look like cleaned copper while the field is so grey? There is not this discrepancy in the second photo.
