Could this be why those mint sets looked terrible during that time?
...I wandered off into an adjacent room that had a large steel tank with a lid on it in the center of the room, and over in the corner a small cement mixer. Next to the cement mixer were several 100-pound bags of dried crushed corn cob.
I asked our guide what they were for. He said that up in the coining area the workers routinely sprayed a light machine oil on the planchets so that they would feed into the presses smoothly. Because the oil eventually discolored the coins, they would remove it before packaging the coins.
They would dump a bag of coins into a steel basket and shake it up and down in the tank, which contained a "de-oxy" compound I later found out was liquid freon. Then, to dry the coins, they would dump the coins from the wire basket into the cement mixer along with a few scoops of the dried crushed corncob and tumble them before packaging them.
That explained why the mint sets in the late 70's thru 1981 looked like heck. I wrote about this somewhere and the manure hit the rotary air circulation device. The Mint never admitted why they did it, but they did not issue Mint Sets in 1982 and 1983. When they resumed in 1984 the quality was much better.
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The packaging was sloppy too. I got one set that had piece of string in the floppy plastic holder embedded with the coins.
https://boards.ngccoin.com/topic/34...early-1980s/=====
Unlike the 1979 and 1980 SBAs, which were mostly struck for circulation, all 1981 dollars were struck for numismatic purposes only, and the entire mintage of 1981 SBAs was slated for collector sets. En route from San Francisco to Denver for packing in red-striped Denver mint set cellophane packaging, the 1981-S dollars were banged up in transit. Seems hard to get some of the coins in high grades->
https://coinweek.com/collecting-the...81-mint-set/Edited by datadragon
04/26/2023 9:52 pm
Posted 04/26/2023 12:46 pm
