Die Study - Province Of Canada 1858 20c

An excerpt from the study.

I suspected there were records somewhere for the 1858 coinage. Thanks for confirming that Rob. I'll amend this section of the study.

Interestingly, as I suspected, this confirms that more dies were indeed required to mint these 1858 20C relative to future similar coin types, which in this case I am still of the opinion was due to differing planchette thickness as the primary significant factor with competency in all phases of the minting process an important secondary factor.

FYI, so far the study confirmed 20 unique obverse dies and 32 unique reverse dies. An additional 10 non-unique obverse and 8 non-unique reverse dies (including the medal alignment coin), what I call the 'hundred series' dies, were found. Obviously most of, if not all of, the non-unique reverse dies are likely unique but cannot be proven as such. There are a few more reverse dies to be found though which will expand the die pair daisy chain. With only 26 obverse dies used, most of the non unique obverse are likely already identified pre die break dies that cannot be proven as such, but a couple may in fact be unique in their own right. The supposition that more reverse dies were used was also confirmed although that was already obvious from the data gathered so far. I'll modify some of the non-unique reverse die aspects of the study as well.

One thing the O/R die count does not provide is die pair quantity, although a minimum of 45 is now a certainty. In the studies' Summary and Conclusions section, a prediction of at least 50 die pairs utilized was made. This looks like a very sound prediction. In fact, it might be a wee bit higher now which, based upon my die tracking experience so far, is a relatively large quantity for only 730,000 coins. They were definitely having some issues with this particular mintage.

Would you happen to know how many 1858 5C & 10 C dies were destroyed?

Later, RD

Much appreciated. Additional studies will be published. Some have interesting findings.