194x LWC - The Case Of The Shrunken Wheatie

I think Spence is right.

@gb, tons of good info on the error-ref website. See here for example:

http://www.error-ref.com/?s=wrong+planchet

Something in the back of my mind seems to re-call high voltage (energy) can shrink a coin..Thought I read about it here on CCF... but can't find anything from the search box.....maybe it was a dream..

Well, had energy been applied to this coin in order to shrink it, it would have a much smaller diameter...I checked out uTube and found a few videos and a link to a neat site..Check out Capturedlighting.com for many examples of shrunken coins.....talk about deflation..

Greasy's




coupled with merclover's




Sends chills up this old man's spine.

Born in the late 40's, I grew up in the '50's extremely poor and housed in poor neighborhoods. An affordable rental for families like mine consisted of very old houses with very little recent upkeep. Electricity passed into the dwelling through a fuse box. If you were to take a modern screw-in light bulb, clear away all its glass and put a flat glass cover on the threaded metal base, it would resemble a fuse of that era. (The LWC pictured above would have seen around two decades of circulation back then.) Fuses blew their heavy filaments just as light bulbs blow their thin ones.

Problem was., many a family who lacked a spare fuse when they needed the lights back on discovered a solution: pull some plugs out of the wall sockets; remove the blown fuse and insert a LWC into the fuse box far enough to close the circuit. Most got away with it because wiring and fuses were a bit primitive back then. Just having too many plugs in the wall would blow a fuse. It seemed to me as a child, that fuses were made to blow in our old dwelling just as wheels were made to roll on the street outside -- and just as often. However, if a short circuit somewhere in an unfortunate family's house wiring was the cause of the fuse blowing, the "penny in the fuse box" would burn the house down often taking a child or a whole family down with it. I'm happier with the drier coin gambit.

Kevin

@ Yokozuna did you ever get that large cent to fit into your pocket watch? (read in an old post)

It wouldn't have a full, strong rim all of the way around the coin if it were a wrong planchet error, unless the planchets were both exactly the same diameter.

The wrong planchet would have had to been the same size or smaller than the Lincoln Wheat cent to have been struck by those dies. The rims are formed by the metal moving into the area provided for them on the die, they are not a part of the planchet.

That's why most wrong planchet errors show no rims and can be slightly out-of-round on at least part of the resulting strike. Rims in this location on a LWC are impossible, so they must have come from some type of "Spooning" action done to the coin after it was struck.




LOL! Wow, yes I did! It really looks great, but now the watch has stopped working. The coin even fits so well into the lid of the case that I can't remove it now.

I still have it around here somewhere in hopes of finding a similar watch, but the quality of this one is just too poor to even try to have it repaired.

I guess I could list the large cent as a rare error on Etsy, but I wouldn't even know how many thousands of dollars my modification added to the value.