1970 S Lincoln Littered With Die Abrasions.

coop, do they use diamond paste too to polish business strike dies? It sounds very expensive to do that.

Thanks kurdlezuit - I keep the more significant clashes I find. Neat to look at and show my son. When I see abrasions, I tend to inspect for the clash. Often, you can make out the original witness marks obscured a bit by the heavy scratches. Most of the time though, the witness marks are gone altogether or don't hold much interest. Looking in the Memorial bays on 'dressed' specimens often show indications of Lincoln's chin, lips, beard and throat. The T and Y of LIBERTY can sometimes be found in bays 2 and 3 (maybe 4). I suppose some areas are more difficult to remove the witness marks without affecting the design adversely. Just a guess by me.

Regarding the use of diamond paste, it's pretty common stuff around inspection and metallurgical labs. We often used suspended diamond dust in a liquid solution to polish sectioned parts where we were either measuring plating thickness or the contours of a part feature. You can get rough parts to a mirror finish. I suspect that while these items are common in the tool rooms of the mint, they opt for faster and cruder methods for removing witness marks (clashes) on business tools. The heavy scratching I normally see seems to indicate emery cloth or wire brushes.

Happy New Year everyone!!

you can buy diamond paste very cheap less then $5 a syringe full on Amazon they even got sets of different microns and they use dyes to color code them.