1881 H Vicky Cent, Double/Triple Re-Punched Letters On Obverse

Hounddog .... until we can see the coins in-hand I will stick with the OP coin (John's) is a 1a because the neck truncation is rounded and somewhat away from the bead. Your coin, Billl, and the one on p 310 are 1a/1 because they come to a point, but has the rounded extremity of a 1a. The coins that were pictured for the 1881's in the 2011 Charlton were mine and Dan's. Without a coin in hand, it is sometimes hard to tell a 1a/1 from a 1 because you can't see the little "dimple" either and both come to a point nearly touching the bead. On coins above XF or so, you can also see a difference on the position of the crown tip. Regardless, John has a nice coin with well-offset doubling and all the photos show the plethora of things that you can find in the 1881's.

Sorry Okie but if you enlarge the pictures all three of the coins shown here have the same die crack at the T in Victoria and if you refer to the 2011 Charlton that picture also shows the die crack.
In the 2011 Charlton they say it's an obv. "1", has this changed?

Cheers, Bill

Thank you all for the replies, since I do not currently have the 2011 Charlton I'm a little lost though, I did find a couple of the same examples on the PCGS site but they are saying it is a "Rare Variety" is this correct?

I recall the 2x2 it was in when I purchased it saying $1.00 so I guess I cant complain if that is the case either way.

Edit: So it is Doubled Die #2 as seen on Coins and Canada?

Yes your coin is definitely the same coin as what Coins and Canada are calling double die #2.
I don't agree it's a double die as all the letters showing the offsets are all re-punched letters. What makes this such an interesting obverse is it was re-punched with the wrong set of punches .
I believe Dr. Haxby wrote an article on this and he determined or believes it was a punch set for one of the Provincial coins that was mistakenly used.
This would not be the first time that an incorrect punch was used but in other cases it was only one letter.
This coin has seventeen letters clearly re-punch with incorrect punches and at least two other that were repaired with engravers tools.
It's definitely a tough coin to find especially in better condition but they do come up and can be found so I'm not sure I'd call it rare.

Cheers, Bill

I managed to somewhat get half-decent full coin photos.





After doing some more research I found that this variety can also be compared to the variety being shown when searching for PCGS# 596404 but I'm not 100% sure I am correct, looks identical to me though.

Thank you for the offer Okiecoiner,

I may have to take you up on that at some point after my modern catalogue is finished as I plan to extend it with a second edition covering repunched varieties on the Vicky cents and some of the older George V cents, more so just educating readers on the differences between doubled dies and repunched varieties since the Vicky cents are fairly documented already.

Glad I was surfing the old topics this week. I by pure luck happened to see one of these couple days ago on ebay and scooped it up.

It's hard to tell from the photo and the wear on the coin, but I think that yours is the one that we put on p.310 however, there were lots of different '81's that had any number of the letters doubled. Plus there was mechanical/machine doubling on the coins, from when the dies were loose in the holders. Look closely at the "V" in Victoria. If it is doubled along the left and bottom, then it's the one on p.310. Also look closely at the "T" in Victoria, as it is full of offsets L, R, and bottom. We priced that coin at $55 in VG, which yours doesn't get that high.

You can see, from the original post, that there was lots of discussions on what the coin(s) actually were, as there were so many different doubling varieties for the 1881. There were 5 of us who wrote the 2011 Charlton variety site, 4 of whom post on this site, and we were restricted on how many pages we could take (80). The section on the 1881's (9 pages) was second only to the space that we made for the 1859 and we had to eliminate probably 6-7 more pages for the '81's. And Houndog Bill who was an avid variety collector and always joined in on the CCRS discussions, both before and after the 2011 Charlton (which we write in 2010) and added clarity to some of our descriptions. He is and was a font of knowledge on all the Vicky varieties.