1942 Merc Dime

I'd say more like VF35. A lot of people would call this XF.

VF/XF I too think that technically it's an extra fine, but market will knock it down a point for the weird color issue to a VF.

The way the color sits on only the deep recesses of the coin show signs of a cleaning once. The color looks more like a type of residue or glue to me, this might be a coin to try a bath in some acetone with, unless you like the color, it maybe showing different on my monitor, but to me it's distracting and takes away from the coin's natural look.

The acetone won't clean it, just help to dissolve and loosen any chemical residue that may have adhered or bonded to the coin a long time ago, I used to get dimes, quarters and halves in during the silver boom 1979-80 that seemed as if they were found in a desk drawer where rubber cement or model glue was all over them. A coin like this is an ideal type to try out stuff like acetone as it is not super high value, (where if you ruin it's looks it kills the value) but is tied to bullion value only. Back when silver was hopping like it is today, we used to get around 50-500 of these in our little coin shop everyday sold for scrap, so many that we barely had a chance to look through them all for better dates before they were being picked up by our silver buyer/smelter. I still know a few guys with quite a few bags of Mercs and Walkers bought as 90% scrap. I saw one hoard of over 15 bags (5000 dimes per bag), as late as 1997.