Posted 02/19/2019 05:20 am
The Reverse dies for the Provincial Cents lived a hard life. EVERY 9 on the working dies was handpunched, and it took 2-4 whacks with the hammer and punch to make it deep enough for minting .. each whack interrupted by rehardening the punch and annealing the die, sometimes by hours, days or weeks. The dies wore rapidly, so maybe 25% or so of the 5's were repunched with the 8 and 1 much less so. However some of the repunches, especially the 1's & 5's have a good amount of offset. I have looked at 10's of thousands of 1859's and have never seen a coin that HAD NOT been repunched somewhere in the lettering or digits, however slight the offset. The REAL scarcity for 1859's is to find one, other than a specimen or proof, that is exactly like the master die.
