1979 Lincoln "T" In Liberty

Looks to be post mint damage

post mint.
Sorry, but keep looking.

I lightened the picture and enlarged it a bit.

It is, of course damage. Take a closer look at the other letters. The B and E are also damaged.

The scenario would be that whatever damaged the rest of the word also damaged the T.

The first thing to point out is that when an anomaly is found, it is critical that you look at the rest of the coin to look for similar anomalies. Then the imagination comes into play. You try to connect the dots, so to speak.

Anything is possible so to try to paint a picture that would cause that damage could have an infinite number of possibilities.

Something as simple as that coin being in a pocket clanging around with other change for awhile could have caused that damage.

Somebody could have placed that coin on a dartboard and a dart could have struck a glancing blow skipping across the word LIBERTY :-)

I am not trying to be funny, but the possibilities are endless.

Then you must consider that a damage followed by 25 or 30 years of wear can change the appearance of the original damage making it impossible to even hazard a guess about what caused it.

There is more value in learning how to determine what could cause errors and by ruling them out decide that a coin has damage instead of the result of an error. We sometimes rule out possibilities leaving behind the last alternative...post mint damage.

Some who have seen literally millions of coins have seen almost every imaginable way that a human or beast can damage a coin so we simply recognize it as something we've seen before.

On this coin, you could write a book of a thousand ways that the coin has been damaged and each scenario could be just as good as any other.

I'm not trying to be a wiseguy. It's just easy to tell it's damage but close to impossible to tell how.

Thanks,
Bill

Just for the fun of it, I took the coin to a friend who owns a jewelry
business and it has been in the family for 4 generations. I wanted to buy a 30X loop. Anyway, he let me look at the coin through a gem stereoscope. Powered up from 1X through 100 X plus. Very interesting.
What I saw (or I should say, what I did not see)showed a diff. scenario. Kind of like sorting through grains of sand.

Bonham - You say that any so called error can be explained as just damage.

This is not true. There are a number of people who have made it a part of their life to understand exactly what our little discs go through in the mint and what can go wrong at any stage in that process. These are the people we refer to as experts. Fred Weinberg, Arnie Margolis, Richie Schemmer, Alan Herbert - just a short list of names of people I know personally who have spent countless hours IN THE MINT watching the process, knowing the machines and how they make coins, and studying what comes out of them. These people KNOW errors, and they KNOW when a coin was not messed up at the mint.

Frankly, what you presented here is obvious as damage to anyone experienced in looking through coins. Experienced, meaning hundreds of thousands to millions of coins over a period of decades - with knowledge gathered from experts, having read the articles and books over the years, and having met and spent time with the people who know their stuff.

Bill is one of those people - he is experienced. I am one of those people - I am experienced. The four people I mentioned above - I have had dinner with all of them at one time or another. I have worked late nights in hotel rooms getting presentations together with the authors of the CherryPickers' Guide. I have personal relationships with Ken Bressett, Jeff Oxman, and other people who are influential in this industry as authors and publishers. I have spent thousands upon thousands of dollars traveling to national shows to learn who these people are, talk with them, soak information from them, learn from their experiences...

So...when people like Bill and I see an image of a coin here and say they are damaged, that's what they are. We don't sit here in our bunny slippers and pass judgement. We've been there, we've done this for many years. We've seen about all there is to see a hundred times over. Don't take what we say about your coins personally, that's not the way it was intended at any time. Just take what we have to say about your coins as professional experienced opinions. It's exactly what you will hear from any other professional in the field if you show them the same coin, and you probably won't be able to get their attention on a message board with a low quality scan. You'll end up paying money for their opinions in shipping, insurance, examination fees, etc. Be glad we are here to stop you before you spend money to figure out what you've saved isn't worth going farther to find out that it's exactly what we've told you it is.