I found a 2012 Alaska State Park quarter the Denali with a huge die crack. I have a few suspect die cracks one in my pennies and one on another State Quarter. I know they show as raised lines. I look for a ridge where the planchet was squeezed into the crack of the die. This particular defect is a little confusing as it looks like there are 2 ridges with a crack in the middle when looked at close up. I am hard pressed to call it damage the depth is consistent across all the features like the planchet cracked. I used the light to shine on it from different directions to see the shadows. Is this what a die crack should look like?
You know how, when you plough a field with a plough, it makes a furrow - a ditch, with raised banks on either side of the ditch. The raised banks are made from the dirt which came from down in the ditch, brought up and dumped on either side by the plough moving through it.
That's basically what's happened here. The "plough" is a sharp knife (or some similar very sharp tool), and the "crack in the middle" of the two raised lines is the scratch, with the raised bits you're seeing next to the scratch on your coin is the metal displaced by the knife, torn up and pushed to both sides of the scratch.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
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