1859 Provincial Cent With Retained Wood Or Fiber Fragment?

The planchets were produced by Heaton Mint.Perhaps the piece of debris managed to enter the crack during transit. Something like that occurring in one out of ten millions isn't far fetched.

Strips were rolled from long rods, which were poured from cast molds. The liquid bronze alloy would have burnt anything wooden "in" the mixture.

The rolling processes was a gradational high pressure flattening of the bronze rod into a sheet of a measured thickness. At any time, during the annealing of the rods or strips, would have burnt any wooden debris inside the annealing furnace.




Lamination edges are sharp... slide any coin with a retained lamination over a piece of rough wood and see what happens. Heck, even not-so-sharp features can catch wood fragments - slide your bare hand over a sheet of rough-finished plywood to see how many slivers of wood become embedded in your hand...

I remain convinced that this planchet was not made with the wood inside, nor was the coin struck with the wood under the metal surface. If there was a retained lamination crack in this coin, then it is easily possible to get a sliver of wood under there...

I don't know. The strike certainly seems to have conformed to the piece of wood in the circled area of the image:



....and DEVLEC's original auction image (albeit not perfectly clear) hints that the lamination is too flat to have had something forced under it. With an extraneous sliver of wood under it, one would not be able to force a lamination back to being that flat. One could assume that the seller did this, thereby delaminating the missing piece, but....

....for scale, one of the beads on the reverse is approximately half a millimeter in diameter. Looking at the visual relationships presented by the images, it can't be imagined that the sliver of wood noted could be more than a tenth of a millimeter in thickness - two sheets of paper - and that's an overly-generous estimation, I think. I sincerely doubt that a piece of wood that thin could be "forced" anywhere.

I have to agree with SPP here. I don't understand how this could have come to be at any time pryer to or during the minting of the coin. If you look closely at the area SsuperDdave has circled you can see a small void on the left side of the foreign object. With the tons of pressure required to mint coins I wouldn't think there would be any void at all and it would be more imbedded into the coin. There is also a direction to the splitting in the planchet running horizontally in the picture as evidenced near the tip of the object, if you follow the path you can see it on both sides of the foreign object. The object is in a opposite direction to these lines and there is no evidence on the top of the object indicating a left/ right direction. I suspect if you could somehow look under the piece you would find these lines would flow uninterrupted.
A more plausible explanation would be that someone a long time ago came across this coin and noticed the lamination problem running around the edge and decided to see if they could pry it open. It's quite evident from where the missing piece broke off that it was bent upwards and from the original photo you can see it cracked when bent back down. The section directly above the object also appears to be raised slightly and probably from the insertion of said object. The lamination on the 1888 pictured below is a coin that I'm quite sure I could insert a small sliver of wood under and replicate a similar appearance.
Don't get me wrong this is a great coin and an real conversation piece but I don't think it left the mint with this piece inside.

Cheers, Bill

A planchet lamination can involve an inclusion - foreign matter in the alloy mix - and either way it was a lamination on the roll/strip; it didn't develop after the strike. Over 100+ years of varying environments and temperature/humidity changes, there is ample opportunity for foreign substances even if in gaseous form to work their way into the lamination, and react with whatever inclusion was there. We know it's open at the rim.

One might slip a sliver of wood in there, but - as I mentioned in my last post - contemplate the thickness of what we're seeing. Can you slip a sliver of paper in there?

Maybe bosox can chime in on this one... but for the segregation of the brass 1859 strikes, you would need differential cooling to allow for segregation of alloys - I can see that happening in a long cast rod, but not a small ingot...

I don't think that the annealing or striking process would get any where near the temp required to burn the wood.