Please Identify Lines On Burnished Eagle

Looks like a fiber on the coin.
John1

I also thought it was a fiber at first, but it has no dimension, just flat, almost as if someone had taken a gel pen and drawn the lines there. I just received it from APMEX so I was wondering whether it's worth keeping or if I should return it.

no Idea what you paid for it, but they aren't available anymore, so if you return it it might be the last one you get your hands on. Just something to think about.

can you get closerand more in focus and also do a shot of it at a distance, like arms length as if you were holding it and looking at it to get a feel for how noticeable it was to the grader.

I'm leaning towards "struck through hair strand" actually, which would inbed into the surface without disturbing much, but if you removed it the line would be there where it was.


Other option is,,, really, the grader did it during grading but before encapsulation, and he'd already given it a SP70 grade?

I'd think they noticed it, but wouldn't attribute as a strike though unless the submitter paid for it to be attributed, but could it be noticed or go unnoticed by a grader?
I mean technically it should be SP69 as it's not perfect,,,, yeah, just odd. Not sure what you should do, but it won't be easy to get a replacement any time soon for it.

did you look up the slab number on PCGS see if there's any info available or a picture from the grading?

a single fiber or strand of hair would flatten in the strike, and may not imbed far enough into the surface to disturb it much, I mean it's struck at around 85 tons of pressure. it will pretty much just flatten a strand and do nothing to the die and not much to the coin surface. A string or thread is something else of course larger diameter.

I mean we'd be talking about an average diameter of 99 µm or 0.00389764 inch diameter, that's pretty small and would pretty much just smash.

I dunno. Please, how about a closer, in focus picture, maybe can identify it better, then a full coin picture in "normal" perspective without magnification to get an idea of how visible it really was to a grader.

SP70 seems awful strange to me.

That picture is much better. It looks to me like like something was on there when it was struck. It makes one wonder if the 3rd party grader even noticed. I wouldn't consider that coin perfect. I could perhaps see giving it a perfect grade if they noted the strike through on the label as well, but they didn't do that.

Is it possibly lamination from a flawed silver planchet? The pic from today looks more like a crack than an ink mark or fiber.

Can we get a pic of the entire slab?

I filed the slab away already, but I do have one not-so-focused picture of the whole slab that I took. The lines are not so defined in the picture, but still quite visible despite the abysmal picture conditions. For the other pictures, John1, it was really just the iphone zoom and a halogen bulb to light it up. This one I just uploaded is worse because I took it under a ceiling mounted fluorescent!