Dryer Coins Explained With Image Gallery, Many Pictured, Some Extreme

Wow! I am amazed. In my FB groups seems everything is a dryer coin when people don't have a good answer. To the point that I just asked, "if it's a dryer coin then why is the edge so squared and the design still so well formed?". Hit err-ref which linked me here and I find out that it is really all about the edge being squared off. Cray cray for sure. I shall bookmark this thread and throw it at one of those FB 'experts' some day. Thanks so much for the schooling @Earle42.

A lot of the things called "dryer coins' are no such thing. There are various ways a coin can be damaged when caught up in machinery but every coin without rims is not an accident. People play with coins and they do things like remove rims or file one side down. They bend them, fold them, and otherwise mutilate them. And then there are guys like me who used to be able to procure "bad coin" that had been abused in machinery or other means and "repaired" them so they could be used again. In the old days there were lots of heavily damaged and corroded coins in circulation and even more that accumulated in buckets and bags because they wouldn't even go through counting machines.

Most dryer coins still work in vending machines and probably won't jam a coin counter.

Great educational thread. Quite a good idea considering we get multiple questions a month, sometimes a week, about these thinking they are errors. It is Well written and very informational.

-CH27

Old-Fashioned Non-machine dryer coins?

If I were to run a metal detector close to where a clothes line used to be, and I find coins which may have fallen out of clothing that had once been hung up to dry, would these dug-up coins also be considered dryer coins?

bobby131313, you just solved a mystery for me.

i noticed this thread got a bump, so I read all the recent posts, plus I worked back, looking at all the pix.

the bobby131313 quote above was posted with a pic of a badly damaged coin from january 10 last year. interestingly, I posted a dryer quarter january 28 last year, and despite my having read that entire thread this somehow did not click until today.

seeing those pix jogged my memory; I had a coin that looked like that & I couldn't understand the damage, but I never posted it here:





i found (what's left of) this quarter on a window ledge outside a laundromat in august last year. I didn't understand the damage & I didn't put together that I had scored a machine-damaged coin, despite finding it where I did. the markings on the reverse look very much like the markings on the coin bobby131313 posted along with the above quote. I'm not sure if I still have the quarter; I might... but I'm glad I grabbed pix of it. now I understand what I found. dunno why I didn't notice it sooner.

i think I determined the quarter was a south carolina Statehood Quarter by the very few remaining clues on the reverse.