Please Help With This 1980 Mint Error Quarter!

I agree. I do have pics to show the out of collar, but they aren't great so I'll post some other ones later. I'm kinda ticked...from the pics I saw I couldn't tell it was gouged and I was hoping for some sort of die break.

You can tell from the photo it is not a die crack. As the line goes through the I of "IN" it goes to the left over the rim and across the unstruck area of the coin caused by the partial collar strike. A die crack would not only be raised but would also stop at the edge of the die.

I zoomed in. It looks struck through, perhaps a wire. Look closely at the top of the 9 in the date. Note how the line does not follow the line in the field. This looks like the wire was punched down into the recessed 9 on the die. Also the bottom of the T in Trust is not touched. If this was post strike the T would have been mauled. There is some build up where the line meets the 8 but I can't make it out.

Here are some more close-up shots.

You are just the person I was going to seek help from on this one.

For what its worth this coin has seen zero circulation. Someone knew what this was and pulled it right away so it doesn't seem likely that the scratch happened in the wild or once in the collector's hands.

I didn't know if there was some obvious explanation as to how this could have happened to this coin while still in the confines of the mint facility, as in something like; "Oh, yeah. Looks like it probably got kicked out the side hatch of the dingle hopper machine" or something along those lines.

If there is no such explanation then so be it. It just kills me not to know! Into the Curious Pile of Post Mint Damage That I'll Never Figure Out it goes.

I have some pennies from a bank roll (1963) that have a deep scratch on it. I know it's PMD and may have happened at the coin rolling company.

John,
I used my macro setting with this old broken off microscope aperture (just the magnification part) that my father-in-law gave me. It was kind of a last ditch effort to get some decent pics because I was getting frustrated, but it turned out fairly well so I was pleasently surprised.

Thanks for all the input from everyone!

Definitely what Coop said, and unfortunately the damage removes most of the numismatic value as an error. Regardless of whether the scratch happened at the mint, the fact remains that it's a scratch on the coin NOT caused by the minting process...thus it is post-mint damage.