Questions About Coin Varieties

From what I have been led to believe and from what I've read, the working die WAS annealed between the die-correction whacks. Maybe there was no resoftening of the dies between corrections/additions, but I've always believed that there were .. sometimes days or weeks between annealing of the dies and hardening of the punches.

Remember that the subject here is in the repairs made to the obverse die and not the reverse.

It was probably an almost universal Mint policy to carry over useable non-dated dies. But what about dies bearing the date? More often than not the Mint carried over "stale-dated" Colonial dies, sometimes overdating them, but often leaving the old date. In one of the 2008 issues of Numismatica Canada, I published a paper on this subject: "Canadian Victorian Overdates and the Use of Unaltered "Stale-Dated" Dies". In that paper I presented evidence for multiple Victorian dates where part of the coinage was struck in a later year. A great example is seen in the Province of Canada cents of 1858-59. At least 13 1858 dies were overdated, yet it is clear that one of the 1858 dies was used unaltered in 1859. We know this because it is linked to the same obverse die as one of the overdate reverses and the obverse is in a later state when used with the 1858 die! That particular case has been published by both Rob Turner and me.