Die Polishing Lines Or Hairlines? Trade Dollar

It's incuse look at the top of the hair.

The only change I made was changing a typo. I changed the word 'What ye things' in the opening to 'What ye thinks'

Don't be so worried about being wrong or thinking you are wrong, Silver Dollar. It's just a poll. Nobody is going to jump your case if you're wrong.

My answer is that I think it has both cleaning and die polishing lines.

Some are hairlines from cleaning, they clearly cross the devices, most especially at the head; die polishing lines are usually on the fields, since the devices (raised) on the coin are incuse on the die and not easy to polish mechanically in situ while preserving uniformity of direction with the field lines at the same time. Luster is greatly disturbed, and the fields show metal movement.

Also note the extreme lack of detail in certain areas: the foot, for instance. This is not due to a weak strike.

However, some of the lines around the waist and behind the grain sheaf do appear to be incuse die polishing lines, and they do not cross the devices.

There is a third possibility, which is that the planchet was mechanically ground/polished pre-strike, but the surfaces are not prooflike as would be expected. My only possible theory for this would be if the planchet was a filed-down/sanded-down blank that had been previously struck or discarded without striking and was, for some reason, struck again after obliterating the original design. The thinner planchet that would result could cause the odd relief / lack of detail seen in places.

A shot of the reverse might provide further diagnostic information.

Where did you draw that from anything I said? Actually don't answer. Of course your comments are more than welcome on this post.

Sort of ruins the looks of the coin regardless of reason.

Learn something new. Draw bench marks. Unless coining method hasn't change from the time this one got struck, I though it has something to do to the planchet itself.

Found more Draw Bench Information:

In the United States silver, in the manufacture of silver coin, is alloyed with copper; the proportion in 1,000 being 900 parts silver and 100 parts copper; and in gold coin, 1,000 parts, 900 being pure gold, 100 alloy of silver and copper, of which not more than 50 parts is allowed by law to be of silver. In practice a very small fraction of this alloy is silver. By means of powerful but accurately constructed rollers, driven by steam, the ingots (which are bars sharpened at one end like the blade of a chisel, and about one foot long, three fourths of an inch to two and a half inches broad, and half an inch thick) are rolled into thin strips or ribbons of the proper thickness for the coin to be made, through the rollers exhibited in the drawing (fig. 4) just above the clock dial. This process is required to be gone through ten times for gold and eight times for silver. These strips must occasionally be annealed in furnaces, in order to soften them, before they are drawn, which latter operation is done by means of the drawing bench (fig. 5), in which they are drawn like wire through a steel gauge to make them straight and of uniform thickness.

I believe it is the rollers on the draw bench that made the marks on the coin (second Image)