1916 D Mercury Dime. A Curious Descrepancy In The Official Mintage

Maybe only 264,000 coins were "officially" released, a figure that excluded damaged examples and those handed out to political figures and dignitaries as the "first year of issue" of the new design.

Who cares? It's still a common coin that just sells for high prices because of high demand nontheless.

PCGS Coinfacts estimates 10000 exist. I wonder how they came up with such a round number...

Logically, it would seem the extras were destroyed... they may have been defective, or whatever. It's only 1.3% of the total produced... I think it would only matter to the most dedicated Mercury dime historians.

Lets look at this from a purly mechanical point of view. You are the coiner and the Mint Director has asked you to give him the average die life from a quality control point of view. You take the number of coins minted and divide it by the number of dies. Simple. Done. Are you really going to go through some complicated process to come up with the number?

Granted there is going to be "shrinkage". I think that is the point. I know that in some years the produced coins until they ran out of metal. It says that in the Mint Directors report.

I believe what happens is that they produce coins until the supply of planchets runs out and they then take a round number when making their report knowing that there will be shrinkage. One interesting thing is the annual report of coins
on hand" it is always a round number. From readings and research we know that people could buy them directly from the cashiers window at the mint, in amounts from ONE to as much as they could cart away. Mention is made that when the new cents came out ( LWC) some people were restricted to three, and then one coin each. Yet, the numbers on hand, with one exepcetion each year, are always even numbers ending in "OOO".

I suspect that the amount of coins left over after bagging, ended up in the cashiers account.

My opinion, for what it's worth, is that mintage figures are rounded down to, at least, the nearest 1000, as a "net" figure.

Does the overage in minting allow for misstruck coins, rejects, etc. that might have gone back to be melted and restruck?

Must agree. All in, tough date.

First this is not an ESTIMATE. This is the official number of peices struck per die. I have verified this by looking at each years reports and corrolating them.

Second, yes, it is the gross amount, before all the QC rejects are taken out.

Third; all the amounts by the branch mint are in an even number. Even though it says that coins were minted till they ran out of bronze, or silver, or gold.

Fourth; the numbers are suprisingly wrong in some instances. For instance the OFFICIAL number of LWC peices struck at SF for 1918 were more than 187K than the submitted mintage.

Lastly, how do you think that the RedBook, et al got their numbers? By looking at the official mintages for each Calander Year in the Mint Directors Report. All I'm doing is taking an in depth look at things that everyone assumes because the " RedBook"" says it is so. Anyway, this is all research for a book, and I don't really want to publish too much on a free forum.

Sometimes...things change.

I doubt that most of the amounts minted of any coin is just an approximate. And as to the 16D Mercury dime, thanks to the Chinese, the amount minted is now about 100 million.