1983-D Moved Mintmark

Generally if these things looka little too wild to be true, they probably are. There are a couple of things that will tell you this cannot be 'true' if you know a little about the minting process:

1. Dies make thousands to hundreds of thousands of coins. If something like this were really out there (a 1983D cent with the mintmark ABOVE the date) it would likely be major news! There would also probably be a number of other similar examples for other issues out there as well. Since this isn't the case, it kind of isolates the issue to one coin, which cannot be something that's IN the die.

2. Because the mintmarks are placed into the die before the die begins striking coins, and each die is hand inspected by an official, a mintmark above the date would be quite obvious enough to notice. Furthermore, the mintmarks were placed into the dies carefully by hand by someone with quite a bit of experience doing it. Key word there is "carefully" - something like this would be WAY off the mark - too far, in fact, to be believable.

I really don't understand where you're coming from. First, lamination looks absolutely nothing like what's in that image. Second, there's only one feasable answer for what IS in that image, and Biokemist answered it correctly. End of story. No need for more photos, it is what it is.

Understood...but the process of "laminating" things other than coins involves bonding of layers. In this case the planchets are dipped in molten metal...plating. So even with general non-coin terminology, the word lamination wouldn't fit. The only part of the minting process that involves bonding of layers is with the clad coinage - dimes, quarters, and half dollars...which is why we use 'clad' to describe the coins.

Delamination occurs in alloy coins (nickels, bronze cents) because the folding and rolling process the ingots go through involves creating cold press layers that sometimes tend to peel away from one another at the edges when struck because of contaminants that enter the process creating pockets between the rolled layers. Severe cases can cause the layers to separate when the blanks are punched - this causes an error known as "struck on split planchet" coins. Less severe cases exist in numerous examples where the layer simply peels back some around the edge. This process and the result is much like rolling a pie crust and having too much flour on the piece at some point when it's folded and rolled. The flour creates a thin pocket where the dough doesn't bond properly, and the layers created by that mistake can tend to peel apart. Although the metal rolling process and the dough rolling process are very different, there is enough similarity to compare them.