Mintmarks

Do you mean that a person hand punched each mint mark into each coin as opposed to it being done by the stamping press?

Ok that was a stupid question. I am assuming you mean that the MM was punched into the die by hand, correct?

Umm, yeah. And there were often 50-150 different dies used in the pre-war years, and 200-300 dies used post-war. In more modern times, especially with the single squeeze dies, that number has jumped to over 500 per year.

The single squeeze dies came into use after the mintmarts were no longer punched into the dies. I'm not sure what ar you are referring to but just before the end of punching mintmarks the number of cent dies would have been roughly a order of magnitude greater. For example that 1986 D pictured. If they were averaging a million coins per die, they would have still needed over 4,000 obv dies for Denver that year. With the mintmark punched by hand into each one of them.

Conder, I am not sure what you mean but there is evidence of single squeeze technology being in use in the 1980s.

Thanks,
Bill