Was Just Grading Some Hole-Filler Shield Nickels When...

wow! nice finds! love them.

Nice finds! Congrats! Love that double date!

WOW. That 1868 had me cleaning my glasses. Nice finds!

The top one isn't an 1883/2, it's an 1882 filled '2' that is common mistaken for the overdate. Just fyi.

The doubled date on the 1868 is impressive, I don't see anything special on the 1882. If you are thinking it is an 1883/2 it isn't.

On an 1883/2, the 2 is actually faint and to the left of the 3, not in a huge ball. In 1882 there was a problem where the 2 became completely filled, leading to people later thinking that the filled 2 was the 1883/2 variety. Go look on ebay for the 1883/2 for examples.

And here we have it!

I went ahead and "illustrated" the process I go through to confirm major die varieties (though I don't always do all the fancy labeling and all - that's just for y'all.

The short story is, I STAND CORRECTED. Conder101 is correct, this is NOT a 3/2. Fooled me. Here's why.





Sorry, they're not in any sort of order.

First, I vaguely remembered one of the varieties had a break at the rim. Turns out that's FS-303. An overlay of a genuine 303 over my coin shows that while it's possible there's a crack on mine, the date numerals don't line up AT ALL.

Same thing with the 302 (probably the best known). I can see cracking from the dot at the base of the shield down the right of the "3" (?). This is the crack that really threw me off. I guess my coin (if it has any crack at all) is just a late die state. Not a 302.

301 and 304 aren't right either. The numerals have too much separation between them for them to be correct. You can see this in the overlay as to make the numerals lay over about the right spot, I had to shrink the image substantially.

So then I looked at the 1883 - again, this threw me off because of the "v" where the two curves of the three came together. I knew the top of the cursive 2 serif met the bottom of the three, but I didn't think the angle was so pronounced. Seemed to me it's about 80 degrees, must be the back of a three.

Wrong! As you can see, the 1882 lies over the "original" coin perfectly. There's even a big dent under the 1!

So Conder101 was right, there's no question, this ain't a 3/2.

I stand corrected!

I put together a similar (but much shorter) explanation for an 1861-O that has a WB-102 obverse in an early die state (uncracked). That article is here:
https://www.coinsniper.com/info/a-l...61-o-wb-102/

In that article, you can see that with a non-WB-102 obv coin, parts of the design line up perfectly while others do not, all things being equal. With the "test" coin overlayed on the WB-102, everything lines up PERFECTLY. Pretty fun, pretty neat!

Thanks Conder101, I was planning to do this soon, you just kicked my butt into gear about it. Glad you spoke up!