1949 S DDO 101 Lincoln Wheat Cent Need Help Identifying.

thats good advise. Mintmark location is something I always overlook.

I see a lot of the same die scratches as 103 on CC. I think thats it.

Has anyone figured out how this die was created? I see this as a 1948 hubbing that was altered to remove the '8' and hub with a 1949 hub? Why? I don't know. But the elements are there that convince me that this is what happened:
[b]Note the first digit of both years and how the die shows both hubbings:

Note the hubbings of the '9's of date:

Note the hubbings of the '4's how you can see each one?

Then the final look at the digits. The '8' is missing of the DDO. There are three different locations for the mint marks, so it was hubbed and then the mint marks were added. It only appears on the San Francisco mints cents. The dies were still being created at Philly. So I figure they needed to make a few more dies and the master die was not available. So they may have created a working die and sent it to San Francisco. That's my theory.

Coophome= 1949-S DDO 1 theory

Let's see:



Looks pretty much like normal. Some of the devices like 'R' seem just a bit wider?

I spent some time reading the Annual Reports of the Treasurer and of the Director of the Mint, trying to pin down the mintage per die figures. (I highly recommend the Annual Reports for bedtime reading. The riveting discussions of Savings Bond redemption rates and debentures is likely the only known permanent cure for insomnia.)

There is hard evidence of 150,000 coins per die from 1913, 1915, and 1923. I can find evidence of 450,000 to 500,000 per die mintages in the immediate prewar years. I can find enough to calculate mintages per die of 850,000+ in the mid-1950s. I can find some evidence for mintages north of a million per die in the ridiculous die overworking era of the early 1960s. For 1949? Nothing. With ranges of 450,000 to 850,000 bracketing 1949, an estimate of 700,000 seems in the ballpark. There are also multiple descriptions of the transition from LDS to VLDS at around the 600,000 to 650,000 figure for the 1950s, which would lend some support for the estimate.

At something near 700,000 coins per die, the January-April mintage north of 52 million would suggest around 80 die pairs. The December mintage just south of 10 million would suggest about 15 die pairs.

IIRC, Philadelphia shipped dies in boxes of 20. Four boxes of obverse dies would match the die estimate for January-April production, suggesting that San Francisco stopped minting cents in April when it ran out of dies. The December production is more problematic. A box of 20 dies would have exceeded the production, suggesting that the clock ran out rather than the dies running out.

I can't come up with any logical explanation of how 77 of 80 dies at the start of the year would have used 1949 hubs while 3 dies used both 1949 hubs and ground down 1948 hubs. It just doesn't make sense. The end of the year mintage would also suggest that 12 of the 15 or so dies in use (or 12+ of 20 in the box) would have used 1949 hubs alone, while 3 would have used both 1949 and ground down 1948 hubs. Again, there isn't a good narrative for this.

The stray October mintage is left as a possible explanation of a time when this might have happened. It is worth noting that Philadelphia did not produce any domestic coins in August and only a relatively small number of cents in September and October.

If Philadelphia wasn't planning on making working Lincoln Cent dies during those months, but had a request from San Francisco, is it possible that an employee used the 1949 working hub for the second impression on leftover working 1948 dies, after polishing the "8" into oblivion? If so, wouldn't EDS coins show evidence of the polishing? Wouldn't that explain the small differences between the coins? Are there any coins showing this? (I've never seen one showing this.)

If working hub to working die doesn't explain this (and it doesn't appear to) then coop's idea of a working hub is the only plausible explanation. But why? Why would anybody do something like that mid-year, and then go back to the original 1949 hub? And if it wasn't mid-year, what could have happened to necessitate two different working hubs being used to make widely disparate numbers of working dies for the same shipment?

Again, this is one odd duck of a coin.

The basic term is doubled die. As of yet, my theory is not generally accepted. But a few of the experts feel there is some merit in my theory. But no way to prove it. No documents about it. The people who were working them are probably all gone now. (coins were struck 69 years ago)