1958 Lincoln Wheat Cent Mint Error - Split After Strike

Interesting find.

very cool cent TB, but do you think that the reverse side had pate on it as it was dipped in the acid, thus protecting most of the design elements?

Great looking Lincoln Cent -

I should think the upper right portion of the reverse also resembles a lamination that fell off post strike. My thought is that the entire obverse lost a thin lamination as well creating the soft strike appearance.

To me the lam loss of an entire obverse and partial reverse would drop the weight more than half a gram.

I'm thinking PMD but maybe not acid.

The area just east of the "s" in pluribus might hold so clues if we could get a closer look. It looks discolored there consistent with the "loss" areas.

Still can't say one way or the other on this thing. It's odd and just won't fit neatly into an answer.

I'm afraid I'm going to hack at the suggested explanations of this coin with Ockham's Razor. The suggested cause of damage so far is some kind of triple-delamination, where the entire obverse, plus a couple of parralel pieces of the reverse, managed to fall off somehow, separately but simultaneously, leaving the central strip of the reverse intact. That's all rather complex, and thus rather improbable. So I will posit to everyone a simple PMD cause for damage like this.

Everyone seems to agree that some kind of "acid dip" might have taken place; the obverse certainly looks very much like any other "Coca cola coin" out there. So all one really needs to do is explain how the reverse manages to look odd like this, with some bits "damaged" and others unaffected. And there is a very simple explanation.

A piece of sticky tape.

I would postulate that the coin was taped to the side of a glass jar, and acid then poured into the jar. The acid was then free to eat away at every part of the coin except the part directly covered by the tape. The boundary edge is ragged because the acid, furiously bubbling away and eating the coin, was more or less effective at attacking the coin under the edge of the tape.

This also explains why the colour of the un-stripped parts of the reverse surface look different to the rest of the coin. The tape has in effect preserved the original coin's patina, the stripped areas are acid-damaged and have since repatinated.

I imagine it would also be possible to create a coin like this "accidentally", rather than as some kind of twisted attempt at creating a fake error coin. For example, the tape might have been the means by which a wire was attached to the coin, to complete an electrochemical circuit. In which case, it is "electrochemical corrosion", rather than "acid", which has caused the damage. But the end-result would look the same.

A very interesting explanation, Sap.

Who wants to replicate the experiment?