1878 P Morgan Dollar VAM-85 New Discovery! New B1 Reverse!

well looks like we both added pictures about the same time. Anyhow, you can see the differences between the two stems

I'm not sure we can conclude which dies (70-82 or 83/84) came first. We'll probably never know why only the two dies were touched up. One theory is that they were the worst in terms of the gap. It might just have been someone with a few idle minutes on their hands.

I've noted that the degree of disconnection varies between B1 stems, leading me to think that some research might turn up a rough timetable of which dies were produced when. Assuming the disconnected stem is a hub defect, one could reason that the gap would increase with successive dies impressed, as more and more metal was obliterated.

Back to Heritage. See you in a few.

Inconclusive, even with Heritage's huge images. I have the ones you sent me a while back, Bryan. Your shots are perfect; I have the stem detail from your 70, 79 and 81. They're very similar.

Makes the doctored dies curiouser and curiouser.

VAM-43 has a disconnected leaf as well (but looks a little different) and its a 7/0 coin (there may be more but this one is fresh on my mind since I have been looking at one thinking of purchasing it myself)

....and a disconnected nostril. Fascinating. Knowing the 7/8TF's were double-hubbed (A and B1), how do we explain it?

I keep coming back to how really, really wispy the stems are on some of these coins. It lends credence to the idea that basining might be involved.

The possibility of basining is something that I cannot answer with any degree of certainty even in my own mind. There must have been a reason for the 8TF to have been added feathers below the wings. Perhaps that is the case here as well. If so, it would indicate that the hub was afflicted with great unevenness of relief.

If an area of relatively low design relief coincided with an area of high point in the field, I could see how the design in that particular area would hit the polishing plate first and be worn completely away by the time the plate made full contact with the remainder of the die face. Possibly the B1 was of no better topographical symmetry than were the A1 & A2 ?

By 'dual hubbed' I assume you refer to a B1 working hub impressing into A1 or A2 working dies?

What causes you to think that 'they' did?

Hmmm, we have differing thoughts on this then...... I do not see that these tips were removed on some and not others, but I see it rather that the old design was not completely obliterated on some yet was (to varying degrees) on others..... I attribute this to the rehubbing of the individual dies..... I would think that the effect of impressing the B1 hub into these various, distinctly different, 8TF dies would produce different results with each particular die.... Each die was different in that some were harder, some were softer, and with renewed annealing each die could be expected to react differently to reimpression. It would not surprise me if in the rush to get these dies completed, some of them may not have cooled completely before hubbing.

I might assume that at least some of these dies had been previously haphazardly basined, so they were most likely of varying degrees of relief?

I think that since most of the A1 or A2 design was retained, and the bulk of the hub relief fit into the die depressions perfectly, no die metal was required to be displaced.

It was the tailfeather area that required the lion's share of die metal displacement.....

The TF area absorbed most of the rehubbing impact, and the feather tips would be where insufficient displacement of the die steel would occur.....

(The void in the tailfeathers was already there in the 8TF), and the tailfeather relief mass of the 7TF hub was insufficient displace metal to fill that void.

Those tips are not something that could (or would) have been attempted to polish out....those are voids in the die.....Liken them to big, big chips.

edited for spelling