1920 D Standing Liberty Quarter You Vs PCGS

While it has all the detail of a VF35 or EF40 I think it's mostly a weakly struck coin. Cline rates this date in the series as one of the best struck almost all gems are full heads to speak of. His book says this date may have an issue with the dies not being properly hardened or tempered so they did not last very long in use. 10% of all were struck with full heads. Obviously this one has some wear, but from the luster I think it's a deceiving coin. I'm going to say:

AU55

I might be way off on this one, as I said it looks deceiving.

@westcoin's evaluation is helpful as always. Grade aside, I certainly wouldn't pay AU-53/55 money for it.

While there's clearly signs of a weak strike, I think there's enough wear to just pull it out of AU, most visible on the reverse. I'm at XF45, wouldn't be surprised if they called it AU.

@westcoin, I don't think the hammer dies were loose. I think QC in Denver was sloppy, and the press operators failed to check close alignment after die swaps and before resuming production runs. Remember, Denver frequently changed one die, rather than the pair in this era, leading to mismatched die states. This is where I think the problem occurred, rather than the initial alignment.

The 1920s Lincoln Cents show this uneven striking on some, but not all, die pairs. The Denver Buffs are all over the lot on alignment and have some wildly mismatched die states during this era. The larger coins and gold coins were better struck, but also used far fewer die pairs.

David Lange and others have noted that Denver resented striking subsidiary coins, and believed that the mint was created specifically to strike gold coins. This attitude no doubt changed after FDR's gold order in 1933, when the need for two western mints started to be questioned. Denver's QC and productivity improved sharply in the late 1930s.

Yep, basically a Colorado kid. I've been in Colorado since I was in short pants. Grew up in the Denver Highlands until we moved to Fort Fun. Our family had a hardware store in Five Points that is very long gone. We rode our bikes to the Zephyrs games and parks and just about all over Denver. Except Colfax. That was off limits for obvious reasons. Denver sure has grown over the years. A lot of that started when Coors Field was built. I can hardly recognize Five Points now. We have a good friend who was on the floor at the Denver Mint for a long time. He knew a lot of the old timers and heard their stories about having to meet production quotas and have better product than San Francisco because one of the mints was going to close. World War II paused that decision for a while, but Denver out-produced San Francisco almost every year and the rest is history. Fun times.

XF45

I can agree with the grade, I don't see luster I thought I was seeing in the original photos now. Looks accurate to me.