1936f 2 Reichspfennig Error

I would suspect tooling, and of the coin rather than of the die. Someone has dremelled down the fields, except for the crevices between the letters and other hard to reach places.

The way the ridge is perfectly circular around the wreath, even though the wreath itself is not perfectly circular... that's not natural, or accidental. Someone has deliberately re-carved the coin to look like this.

Given that some features, such as the oak leaves in the wreath, are worn flat and not edited I suspect someone has taken a worn coin and "improved" it by re-engraving some of the missing details, such as the eagle feathers.

to the Community!

The kind of tooling as I'm suggesting here is quite commonly seen on ancient coins, where it's a lot easier to get away with it since ancient coins are a lot more rougher and "hand-crafted" to begin with. It isn't anywhere near as common on modern machine-struck coinage.

I'll happily admit I have no idea why anyone would go to the trouble to do that to a (relatively) common coin, other than perhaps someone hoping to make big bucks selling it as a high-grade coin.Perhaps they were practicing their art on a cheap coin before having a go at "improving" a more valuable target. And just because you bought it cheaply, does not mean its previous owner had also bought it cheaply; perhaps they had been suckered into paying a high price.

It may seem improbable, but any kind of "mint error" hypothesis is even less probable: raised lumps on a coin mean missing bits from the die, so someone in the Stuttgart mint in 1936 hacked away at a worn die, perhaps in an attempt to try to recreate details. It would be far easier for that mint worker to simply throw the worn die away and get a new one made from the master hub.

There are two other options not yet considered:

- It's a counterfeit coin, in which case, all bets are off as far as die quality is concerned. This does link back to the "why bother" question, though.

- Some kind of glue or varnish is stuck on the coin, and has mostly been removed except from those hard to reach spots. This is surprisingly likely, as clear glue, lacquer or varnish sitting on metal can easily fool us into thinking it's solid metal there. Giving the coin a swish in acetone ought to rule out this option.