I've realized that I have a habit of mostly posting questions or successful variety hunts. I thought it might be useful to folks learning how to variety hunt if I posted an example of a failed or inconclusive
ebay hunt for a 1945-S
Mercury dime inverted mint mark FS-504.
After examining the
ebay images, I decided to pony up the $15.99 for this particular dime. Worth noting: a circulated common date
Mercury dime is not worth $16. Not even close. However, I like to have concrete examples of the varieties that I hunt in my little coin reference library. There are things you can learn from examining the actual coins under magnification that you simply cannot learn by reading all the reference sites.
Original images:
My images:
The mint mark grid shows the S at 0-90-180-270 to the indirect sunlight. The right two images are PCGS references. One shows a skinny knob-S mint mark, the other shows a fat knob-S with some spreading due to poor metal flow near the rim.
The most significant pick up points on the knob-S IMM are the teardrop top termination, the flat flared bottom termination, and the triangle body notch. If it's upside down, you should be able to see a bulbous termination on the bottom and a nice flat termination on the top. You can see here that the top termination tip is flattened. But the bottom is out of shape, most likely due to circulation wear. Ultimately, I concluded that the top is just a teardrop termination that got scraped into a flattened shape, and that the S is correctly oriented. The bottom was harder to analyze in the pictures because it is faded from wear and a bit uneven from circulation scapes.
The little $16 cut stings a little, but that's how we learn. I hope other novice variety hunters find this post useful. You aren't going to get it right all the time in the early stages of learning. As long as the bumps and bruises are small, they should be taken in stride as part of the learning process.
Posted 08/19/2024 4:47 pm
