1940 Lincoln Wheat Cent Mint Error - Retained Cud (None Listed)

Roughly speaking, there are 93 Retained Cuds known from 1940-S on cuds-on-coins.com. Most were found and listed by a fine gentleman and friend of mine who started collecting Cuds many years ago before I even knew what they were. My contributions to this date came late, but I have one new die stage and five new Retained Cuds listed so still things to find. It's comparable in date only to the 1943 coins for quantity of Cuds and Retained Cuds produced in the wheat series (1983 is another story when they switched to zinc).

But so far there are none from Denver for this year, and just this one lonely example from Philadelphia. It would be an interesting numismatic question as to why the dies in San Francisco chipped up so much, while the dies in the other two mints almost did not at all.

Thanks CoinHunter! The rest of the maybe 250 coins I went through were nothing special, so just a single find tonight. Now off to bed as I haven't slept much in the last few days and have to be at work tomorrow. Been a wild ride lately and happy to have had the time to score one good one.

Interesting question about why they seem to almost exclusively be contained to the San Fran mint.

Since Philly produced the dies during this era and sent them to the other mints I would think it had to do with the equipment, not the bar stock. Whether it was loose dies contacting the collar or tilting to repeatedly strike one side more than another they seem to be mostly contained to the east and west areas, near the wheat lines.

I wonder if the feeder finger scrapes we see on the reverse during the early '40s have any correlation? I've never made note of whether they are on the coins from one mint more than another. Has anyone else made notes about the mints for these feeder finger scrapes?

Great find Tropicalbats! I hope all is well and you aren't too stressed.

Awesome find tropicalbats!

Is it possible that San Francisco simply ran their dies longer because they were further from Philadelphia and were dependent upon them for their dies. If die shipments were slow they may have had to use the dies they had even if they were breaking up. Denver was closer, and of course Philadelphia was making the dies so they always had a ready supply to replace dies once they started to break. How does 1940 compare to surrounding years?

IMHO, I don't think that "running their dies longer" would be the cause in this case, since San Fran would have received the proper quantity initially to meet their production goals. (The same compared to Denver anyway.) If they needed more dies because of faulty bar stock, it seems Denver would have the same issue.(ie: an average number of coins per die pair- unless SF was unlucky enough to get all the dies from bad bar stock.)

I really feel it has to do with excessive stress placed on the dies in these areas in the San Fran mint in 1940 for some reason.

Lots of equipment to oversee and attend to. It might be as simple as an inexperienced newbie or hurried veteran worker not tightening something properly allowing movement or tilting East to West. This tilting could cause the dies to receive excessive and repetitive pressure in these areas.

We can't even know if human stress a year before the US joined WWII may have been a factor in a mint worker's focus adjusting the equipment.