1943 Penny Need Some Help Please

Yes. Plated. The "extra face" is an optical illusion.

Thanks. I try to preserve all my coins the best I can when I get them. One other thing. Look under the 4 you can see something protruding from the coin... kinda reminds me of the bottom of lincolns chin. Rather than being even with the surface it is raised...

You are definitely wrong. It is magnetic so it is plated.

All that said... Yes it is magnetic. If it is plated it is the first of plated 43 I have ever found so Superdave must be collecting them all. LOL. My issue is that if it is just plated... why would it not look like a normal 43 just with plating? Why the second looking Lincoln face? Why the raised metal under the 4? If one were creating just a plated coin I would think they would try to make it look just like a normal one... Not create one with so many things wrong with it. Isn't that the purpose of a fake? To try to pass it off as a real error coin? In this case it makes no sense as to why all the other things are wrong along with the color of the coin not being correct.

After ten years of this, I'm unable to count the number of these we've seen here, of both types I mentioned. Whatever was used to plate it - and the reasons for doing so range from maliciousness to school projects to idle people learning the plating process - was either applied improperly or is failing now. The "shape" you're seeing is just a random shape which unfortunately *sorta* bears a resemblance to the profile.

The thing to to with coins like this is to work the other direction in your thinking. Not "what did the Mint do here" but "how could the Mint do what I see here?" With a little more knowledge of the minting process (and it's not like somebody's expecting you to learn all that tonight) one begins realizing that it would take a ridiculous and impossible set of circumstances for the Mint to produce something like this. To the point, actually, when just about anything you could imagine happening postmint - and even stuff you can't imagine - starts looking more likely.

Your interest in what's in front of the profile has caused you to pay less attention to what's in back of the profile, which doesn't resemble anything yet must also be explained at the same time. And there's plenty of explanation needed for the stuff on the reverse as well.

And since we already know it's magnetic, well, the Mint is the very first thing that comes off the list of possibilities as all the copper 1943's they did, don't stick to a magnet.

So are the gold plated 1883 No Cents Liberty nickels. I get tons of talk on those.

The coin looks funky because whoever did the plating selected an uncleaned corroded steel cent, the underlying corrosion is what is causing the copper plating to bubble up. "Copper" 1943s are not necessarily made to fool collectors, many of them are simply created as a novelty or even homemade electroplating experiments.