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Spectacular Double Strike, 1979 Lincoln Cent

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 Posted 07/22/2020  4:49 pm  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add Spence to your friends list
Spectacular is a great way to describe this. Thx for posting!
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 Posted 07/22/2020  6:09 pm  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add nick10 to your friends list
Nice example. All sorts of things can go wrong where high speed presses are involved, but sometimes coins are so deformed that I too wonder how they got out of the mint.
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 Posted 07/22/2020  6:40 pm  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add levelsofmadnes to your friends list
hello thegrendel

excellent error

If you get the chance, please upload a picture of the reverse.

thanks
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 Posted 07/22/2020  6:51 pm  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add CoinHunter27 to your friends list
What a great error! Amazing coin!

-CH27
Collector of U.S. Coins, Varieties, and Colonial Coinage
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 Posted 07/22/2020  7:04 pm  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add Nieuw to your friends list
Very nice!
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 Posted 07/22/2020  9:50 pm  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add Yokozuna to your friends list
Is the second strike full or is it uniface? Could you post a shot of the reverse?

Nice error!
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Spectacular-Double-Strike,-1979-Lincoln-Cent


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 Posted 07/22/2020  10:48 pm  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add GrapeCollects to your friends list

Quote:
but a deliberate "error" produced by a rogue US Mint employee


Incorrect. An off center double strike occurs when a coin fails to fully eject and a second planchet is fed into the chamber. Given there are 2 planchets in the chamber, the collar cannot close and because of that the planchet is not centered, which is why the secondary strike is off center. If the coin is biface and not uniface, that indicates there was not a second planchet fed into the chamber, but the initial coin did not eject and was struck out of the collar.
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 Posted 07/23/2020  02:20 am  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add Conder101 to your friends list

Quote:
An off center double strike occurs when a coin fails to fully eject and a second planchet is fed into the chamber.

Correct


Quote:
Given there are 2 planchets in the chamber, the collar cannot close and because of that the planchet is not centered, which is why the secondary strike is off center.

Incorrect, the collar is a solid piece of metal it does not open or close. The improperly ejected coin is simply on top of the collar and overhanging the coining chamber.


Quote:
If the coin is biface and not uniface, that indicates there was not a second planchet fed into the chamber,

Correct.

[quote]In my opinion, this is not a conventional error coin, but a deliberate "error" produced by a rogue US Mint employee. There are too many examples of similar coins around, and they are not particularly expensive to buy.
It is a legitimate error. The reason there are so many of them is because the mint makes so many coin and back them the quality control was a little more lax. The coins were bagged and shipped out to the rolling facilities. The workers at these places knew that dealers would pay a premium for errors so they would keep any they found and then sell them. If they have an error rate of .001%, by the time the worker rolls 200 bags, he'll have 10 of them. So every month he takes what he gathers and sell 1 - 2 hundred to the coin dealer. So the errors are spread out very thinly among all the production, the rolling worker concentrates them, and then they are further concentrated in the dealers hands and HE will probably bulk sell them to an error specialist dealer. So a significant quantity of all the errors like this made eventually wind up in just a few hands which makes it seems like there are a lot of them. And frankly that estimate of an error rate of .001% is way too high. A rate like that would mean a production of over 60,000 of them for 1979 P alone.
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 Posted 07/23/2020  02:52 am  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add merclover to your friends list
Thanks for the detailed explanation, Conder101

Quote:
the mint makes so many coin and back them the quality control was a little more lax. The coins were bagged and shipped out to the rolling facilities. The workers at these places knew that dealers would pay a premium for errors so they would keep any they found and then sell them. If they have an error rate of .001%, by the time the worker rolls 200 bags, he'll have 10 of them. So every month he takes what he gathers and sell 1 - 2 hundred to the coin dealer. So the errors are spread out very thinly among all the production, the rolling worker concentrates them, and then they are further concentrated in the dealers hands and HE will probably bulk sell them to an error specialist dealer

OK, wait... we are talking U.S. currency here. This makes the process sound like some back-alley operation. There is no oversight involved here? How is it someone can keep these coins then resell them?

And, there is no quality control at the Mint? Even a .001 error rate sounds like a lot to me. And tell me again (I'm slow) how these are allowed to ever leave the Mint? Even if quantities are simply weighted to verify numbers going out the door at the Mint, certainly these one-and-a half coins must throw the weights counters off?

Somebody at The Mint has to be responsible for these error coins, yes? Or maybe not?

Please excuse my curiosity, I find this all fascinating!


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 Posted 07/23/2020  09:37 am  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add thegrendel to your friends list
Sorry for not originally posting a pic of the reverse.
I had taken a couple, but inadvertently deleted them.
Pulled out my trusty, rusty camera and took another.

Taking a close look at the second strike on the reverse, it's a distortion, not at all like the clear second strike on the obverse. Don't know what to make of that, but I'm sure the experts here will be able to figure it out. Enjoy!
Spectacular-Double-Strike,-1979-Lincoln-Cent
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 Posted 07/23/2020  09:44 am  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add thegrendel to your friends list
>> And tell me again (I'm slow) how these are allowed to ever leave the Mint? <<

My guess is that mint employees are not strip searched on their way out at the end of the shift. And the guards are their poker buddies, right? Probably don't even check their lunchboxes, much less socks and underwear.
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 Posted 07/23/2020  11:20 am  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add Earle42 to your friends list
I was always under the impression these make it out of the mint in the large bags coins are shipped in. They obviously won't fit into bank rolls.
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 Posted 07/23/2020  11:24 am  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add nick10 to your friends list
Anyone curious about the coin production process can take a tour, when available, of the mint's production lines. It is largely automated. There are no people carefully hand inpecting every coin made. Doubly-struck coins weigh the same as the others, so weight is not a way to check for errors of this type. One extra coin in a bag of thousands would not be detetctable by weight anyhow because one extra coin weighs less than the sum of the planchet Weight Tolerance of all the others in the bag. Reducing the error rate from 0.001%, or whetever it is, is deemed not worth the cost.
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 Posted 07/24/2020  12:12 am  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add Conder101 to your friends list

Quote:
OK, wait... we are talking U.S. currency here. This makes the process sound like some back-alley operation. There is no oversight involved here? How is it someone can keep these coins then resell them?

Remember the we are talking in the case of this coin 1979, quality control wasn't as tight them. (today they have additional riddler systems for screening out undersized, oversized and mistruck pieces. Also the change from vertical to horizontal striking eliminated a lot more errors. This is wherrors after 2001 are much rarer than earlier dates.) But anyway even back then the process was highly automated and many mistruck pieces could get out if they were bagged by weight. Much less likely if they bagged by count because thing like the OP coin would jam the counter.)
Probably in the 50's and earlier they bagged by cault but I would suspect that in the 60's they switched to bagging by weight. I know they bag by weight today.

So anyway the sealed bags were shipped out to the Federal Reserve banks or the armored car services. The Fed also shipped bags to the services. The armored car companies are not part of the government so now the coins are out of the government's hands. For the most part if the dollar tallies coming in matched the dollar tallies going out the armored car services didn't care if the employees switched out good coins for defective ones. (also sometime the bags would just be shipped unopened to the banks and they did the rolling.)


Quote:
And, there is no quality control at the Mint? Even a .001 error rate sounds like a lot to me. And tell me again (I'm slow) how these are allowed to ever leave the Mint? Even if quantities are simply weighted to verify numbers going out the door at the Mint, certainly these one-and-a half coins must throw the weights counters off?

Yes they is quality control at the mint, but not on the level in 1979 than there is today. And I said an error rate of .001% not .001, different by two orders of magnitude. >001 would be a bad coin in every thousand, .001% would be a bad coin in every 100,000, and in my last sentence I did say that even that .001% estimate was way too high. Frankly .0001% would still be too high, but .00001% would probably be too low.

An off center double struck coin weight exactly the same as a regular cent so there would be nothing off when bagging by weight. It would just be counted as one cent.


Quote:
Somebody at The Mint has to be responsible for these error coins, yes? Or maybe not?

Institutionally responsible yes, personally responsible no.

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 Posted 07/24/2020  12:28 am  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add jpgrajek to your friends list
Wow, nice coin.
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