1834/3 Do (Durango) 8 Reales With Serious Planchet Edge Flaw

Actually Lucky Cuss it makes sense if you know some of the back story.

The Durango mint was operated in the first few years of existence by the State of Durango. The State of Durango was basically not well run and there was virtually no quality control. This is seen in the wide variance in early dies. They could not even get the matrix design to match die to die.

It got so bad that the State actually closed the mint briefly. The solution was to lease the facility to a private entity that also had ties to the mines of the area. The operators under the lease were M. Bras-de-Fer and Jose Antonio Pescador. They replaced and updated mint equipment. They also elected to use master dies (hubs) to create working dies to eliminate inconsistent coins.

The hubs were French products and they were superior to Mexican dies of the period. Buying hubs like this was actually not even legal but it was done. Production at Durango sharply increased.

This use of hubs masks the simple fact that the balance of the technology was still rather primitive. Rolling, blanking and edging were still done the old way. The bottleneck in production became planchets not dies.

What you are seeing is the necessity of making more planchets more quickly. The same thing happened in Zacatecas in the 1830s when they adopted king Punches for large parts of the die face.

The French hubs were used far too long. The numerous redates are all due to the fact that the hubs as delivered carried full dates and assayer initials. They were out of date by 1832 yet they were used for 10 years - until they literally fell apart.

So the mix of technologies produced a mixed appearance in the coins.

Actually some of the best looking coins (1832 and 1834) were actually counterfeits made most likely by the French and which flooded the US from French colonial possessions. The technology employed by the forgers actually produced better "Sheffield plate planchets" and in an MS state they are better looking than many originals.

Your coin is genuine - it is rather typical of the type - a nice real coin that shows the difficulty they had with planchet production after adopting hubs.