Romania Die Crack?

Yep!

Nice Find!

for US coins it can add a premium because there is a buyers market for them. as far as foreign goes it's possible but it's not in demand.

This is the first coin with a die crack I find. But I feel it's more valuable since it unveils one more thing about its past and after all, abot history.

When a steel die breaks - it usually starts as a small stress crack in the surface. This small hole in the die is transferred to the coin just like the designs on the die. So you can see the crack develop.

Most mints will change the die as soon as a major crack develops. They don't usually wait for big breaks. So cracks may not be all that common in SOME mint products.

From the CCF glossary:

die break

An area of a coin that is the result of a broken die. This may be triangular or other geometric shape. Dies are made of steel and they crack from use and then, if not removed from service, eventually break. When the die totally breaks apart, the resultant break will result in a full, or retained, Cud depending whether the broken piece falls from the die or not.

die crack

A raised, irregular line on a coin, ranging from very fine to very large, some quite irregular. These result when a hairline break occurs in a die.

In this instance, the crack has formed in a weak spot on the die - the stars, The crack is the jagged line connecting the last A of ROMANIA and all the stars on the right hand side. That's quite a large crack - the die very probably broke shortly after this coin was made. These coins are made of nickel-plated steel, not the easiest substance to strike coins from - dies would wear and break quite rapidly, I would imagine.

stratocaster You have asked the $64,000 question. Unfortunately only the mints know and they are not 100% forthcoming except in published studies. The last one I reasearched was the 1996 US 25 cent coin struck at Philadelphia. I identified 305 different die pairs from the die cracks that developed. (I did the study over a one year period by examining up to 25 rolls of new quarters per day in an attempt to see if it could be done using only two Federal Reserve Bank areas (Boston and New York). There were over 3,000 die pairs as I recall and the production went from 1 coin - a die broke on the FIRST strike to just under 500,000 coins for one prolific die pair. So there is a wide RANGE.