1902 Indian Head Cent On Venezuelan (?) Planchet

It should weigh 3.11 grams or there abouts. Pics of the front and back are a must. It's hard to determine what you might have without them.

Interesting.

Welcome to Coin Community, stazstaz. I'd have replied an hour earlier - I saw your post immediately - but I've had my nose buried in books and the Internet since. There are three potential donor countries: Columbia, Ecuador and Venezuela. My first thought is, an 0.9g coin nearly the diameter of a Cent would be extremely thin, nowhere near the thickness of a Cent. Is there any way we could see images of your coin?

We'll go from there. And, no, I could find no similar error coin.

Amida17, does that book have this chart in it?

http://minterrornews.com/foreign_co..._figures.pdf

I'm familiar with thar list as well. I'm guessing its on a Centimos flan.
stazstaz, is it a lighter color than your typical BN IHC?

First image is compared to modern cent, see ruler. 2nd is the 1902 on top of modern cent. Third is 1902 reverse. Fourth is side view, 1902 is much thinner. Do these help? Thanks!

Interesting. It appears to have strike pressure weakness associated with smaller planchets.

The Philadelphia Mint had a longstanding relationship with the Westbury Mint in Connecticut. In fact, Westbury supplied most of the 1C and 5C planchets used by Philadelphia at this time, and they even struck some foreign coins contracted to the US to produce. It would reason that Westbury might produce those planchets, as well.

1903 was the first year the US Mint had ever produced coinage for Costa Rica. With a brand-new coin, and a brand-new customer, one would think that the Mint would wish to maximize their chances of putting well-minted coins into the hands of the customer as early as possible by way of guaranteeing future business. There were other capable mints in the Americas.

And keep in mind, this was not a "just in time" production environment. Not when your transport system depended on steamships and horses.

So, imagine: Westbury is contracted to produce planchets for this run; perhaps even mint them, but who knows? Production would want to start early, to allow for not only long shipping times, but also the possible loss of the mintage in a shipwreck, while still leaving sufficient time to maybe correct the loss and get coins to Costa Rica in time to issue in early 1903.

There's no reason to believe that the mint run would want to begin any later than early summer. Whoever minted them, chances are Westbury produced the planchets and would have done so even earlier if Philadelphia were doing the minting.

In fact, knowing the job was coming, and knowing they had to supply Cent and Nickel planchets also, why not send them all at once....

The 1.0g 1903 Costa Rica 2 Centimos flan, if used to strike an Indian Head cent, would be way too thin, show very little fine detail, and likely have an irregular rim. In fact, I think it'd look a whole lot like the coin pictured here.

Wow, thanks for the replies. The Costa Rican 2 centimos is certainly a candidate. I will look around and see if I can find someone who has a scanner. We are in the Lake Jackson area, about 45 miles south of Houston, but we do go in to Houston about once a week or so. I will keep you informed.
So, is this an interesting coin? As in, odd, rare, someone might want to buy it, or something I should stick back in a drawer? My father did not like error coins.