Greetings From Queensland Australia

Hello and welcome from another Queenslander.


You're free to post whatever questions you like, in whatever forum you think is the most appropriate for it. Australian coins? Australian subforum. A general numismatics question? Main coin forum is fine. And don't worry about "making a mistake"; if the forum moderators think a question is in the wrong place, we'll simply move it, no worries.


This is an example of what you will encounter on an international Internet-based coin forum like CCF: local variations in coin jargon are not universal. Yes, for most of the numismatic world, a " Cud" is a die chip located on the rim of a coin, and all of our American members will politely correct you on this matter. But here in Australia, thanks to Ian McConnelly's long-running series of articles in Australian Coin Review where he mis-used the terminology and he refused to be corrected on it, error collectors in Australia will commonly call any die chip anywhere on a coin a " Cud". Or more usually a Cud, as if "C.U.D." was some kind of acronym for it. But globally, calling a die chip a " Cud" is not correct.


Here's the thing: the process of minting a coin is not a mystery. It's a well-known industrial process, and has changed surprisingly little since it was first invented 2600 years ago. Being a relatively simple process, there are only a small number of ways in which it can go wrong, and produce an "error coin". However, once a normal non-error coin is produced and issued out into the public, millions of bored, careless and/or highly creative people can get their hands on it, and can do all sorts of weird things to that coin that might at first glance make it "look funny". All of those things are, by definition, " PMD" and not mint errors. And we cannot always know why, since we weren't there to watch the damage happen. Sometime we might guess as to what caused the damage, such as "it got caught in a lawnmower" or "someone hacked at it with a screwdriver". But all we can say sometimes is "I don't know how it happened, but it's not a mint error, therefore it must be PMD".

Genuine mint errors are valuable because they're rare, and they're rare because they don't happen very often. Mints all over the world have quite good quality control measures in place to both stop mint errors from happening and to stop them from getting out into public hands if they do happen. But no quality control system is perfect, and some of those errors will inevitably escape. But nevertheless, the vast majority of "coins that look funny" look funny because of PMD, not a mint error.

to the Community!