How Is This Possible?

It may have found it's way into a sealed bank bag, or a mint employee custodian found it while sweeping up the rejects, lol.

I have never even heard of anything like that

With free shipping offered I might bid 1c.

I am not sure if the Mint was using riddlers in 1998 but they definitely use them now in addition to waffling anything the riddler catches


I had the pleasure of conversing with Fred Weinberg at a show one time about this very subject- he has contacts with the armored carrier companies(Brinks, Loomis, Wells Fargo, etc). They receive the coins from the Mint in massive ballistic pallets and the carriers roll them and they usually catch any errors that made it past the Mint controls. Fred then purchases the errors, although I do not know if it is from individuals or the corporate carrier. I would say it would be almost impossible to obtain an error like this now due to new quality control measures put in place by the Mint around the beginning of the decade.

Unfortunately, the general public has not been able to obtain many new errors due to the quality control measures. Mint bags purchased from a bank were formerly the primary way of obtaining errors but no more mint bags. I suppose it is still possible to find them in the premium bags that the Mint sells but it would be a much slower and more expensive proposition.

As far as how it happened, the cap was a coin the got stuck to the obv die and thinned out while wrapping itself around the die as it continued to strike other coins. Coins struck with the capped die would be known as a brockage, a reversed incuse image- those coins are nice errors by themselves and one that I do not have in my error reference set yet. Somewhere in the process, the striking chamber got jammed up with another planchet and the repeated striking bonded the capped die and another planchet. That big honkin' error will only weigh 10g(two planchets) but looks much larger since it was thinned out due to repeated strikes. All of those semi-circular lines between the cap and planchet would be the repeated strikes, I assume the seller put it under a microscope and counted them to arrive at a 100+ strike figure.

biokemist6,

I have conversed a few times with Mr. Weinberg and have found him to be a very nice and courteous person. I am sure that you had a great time conversing with him as well and I am sure that what he told you is true! However, I suspect that he or any other Big Time Error Coin Dealers are not about to tell you the full story. There is just no way that Error coins such as the one that is the subject of this Thread, should ever get past the Quality Control processes at the Mints! Therefore, either the Mints sell the coins to these Dealers or some employees are sneaking the Error coins out of the Mints and selling them on the side or other. That other, is that it is possible that the Mints let the employees purchase these Error coins and then the employees sell them to certain Dealers.


Frank

Jim,

I never stated that there was a conspiracy going on! I was merely stating my beliefs that either the Mints are selling these coins to certain...Big Time Coin Dealers and kept hush..hush. Or that the Mints sell the coins to Mint Employees who are reselling them to the Dealers or that the coins are being removed from the Mints by some Employees and then sold to the Dealers. The Mints have done a lot of things...some of which are questionable...concerning the coins that they have produced over the past 217 years since their inception and have been either slow to divulge information or totally clam mouthed about what they do. Even though they may not divulge what they do, a conspiracy does not it make!


Frank

How would value be determined on a piece like this? Is the seller throwing out a price tag of $12,500 to see if he gets any bites or other offers, or is it really worth that much?

I would tend to agree that "someone" is getting these coins out of the Mint, some-how. I also know that for many years, there have been less than perfect detection of these coins leaving the Mint.
I do not know and we might not ever know the actual truth, but we do know that certain people "seem to come up with these coins" in a more than unique fashion, I at times believed that some employee's found the needed ways to remove these coins from the Mint, just the $$$$$$ alone for one of these seems to tempting, however, I just can see the "bored" employee playing around with the coining process and well, stranger things have been know to happen at the U S Mint........All just my opinion.

PS: How do you think the 1933 gold pieces were obtained!!