We will look over all of this great information and see what changes need to be made to the die states for E7 and E7b in the catalog.
There will be many new intermediate states that turn up for the 1859 dies, especially in the later states as the dies deteriorated and there were minute changes to almost every coin struck near the end of a die's use (if you could have seen the coin in it's mint state before wear began to hide the expansion of cracks, collapse, and die clashes).
Some of the changes will be significant enough to be listed in the catalog, and some may not. Since we are not going to be changing existing die state numbers for new states, but will add a new die state with a decimal (4.5 for a state between current states 4 and 5) That way collections won't have to be constantly renumbered. And even if a state is not yet listed in the catalog, collectors can add the decimal designation in their records to show it is an intermediate state.
It's great to see these examples of interesting die states posted on the forum. Thanks!
Posted 04/05/2020 6:43 pm
