2009 Silver Proof Quarter Die Error

I appreciate your passion in this coin and believe the best you could do, for your self, would be to send the coin to Mr D..............Good Luck.

It is my intent to see if Mike Diamond will do a review of the coin for me. I like to do things certain ways (read that I am a stubborn old cuss) and I am intent on joining CONECA before asking him to put the effort out. I have just mailed my membership form and check and once it is accepted I will open lines of communications on a formal basis. I am not in a grand hurry and I really appreciate all of the questions and opinions that I am getting here and on other boards I have posted on. One of the things that I have discovered is that the reeding anomaly is actually a secondary effect that operates in conjunction with the fact that silver quarter planchets made in Perth have a groove that can survive the minting process. One of my 2010 silver proof quarter sets shows the groove remnant on all five coins. In my 2009 sets, only this coin shows any remaining groove from upsetting and it follows the field defect on the coin and disappears where the coin is normal. Apparently neither the mint nor PCGS care about a groove in the reeding, the mint doesn't seem to have dome anything to eliminate it and PCGS did not grade down or refuse to grade for it. In fact, the PCGS slab completely hides the reeding on the quarter.

Here is an annotated image that explains what can be seen on the coin. The color reduction was necessary to get the file size down. The comment about roughness loses meaning at this file size but in the full resolution image the difference between the two field areas is clear. Whatever the die hit was not as polished as the die field. What is clear in this image is the fact that the upper section of the field is raised, as evidenced by the lettering sidewalls. This picture was taken with two light sources, one from the top and one from the bottom, causing lots of reflections and some shadows.

Mike Diamond should receive the coin today and hopefully we will get his take on the coin sometime later this week.

Since taking these images, I have done some more experimenting with my new camera and can now produce fairly good pictures with a resolution of about 1 micron per pixel, a 35mm equivalent of about a 7X macro. I am using a Canon T2i with a Canon EF-S 18-135mm F3.5-5.6 IS zoom lens reverse mounted via an adapter ring. In this configuration the autofocus and image stabilizer are inactive but the lens is left with its aperture wide open. The setup can focus on a subject about 8 inches from the "film" plane, leaving about 1-5/8 inches from les to subject, plenty of room for decent lighting. Depth of field is limited by the inability to stop down the lens (something that my 30 year old FD 35-105mm zoom can still do when mounted backwards) but the wide ISO range (~100 to ~12800) and the shutter speed range (30" to 1/4000") give plenty of exposure choices. The images presented so far were taken with the FD 35-105mm lens which has a best case resolution of about 2.5 microns per pixel (about a 3X macro) but it has better depth of field.

At 1 micron per pixel, the full frame is about 5.2mm X 3.4mm or about 0.20 inch by 0.13 inch. At its highest physical resolution my scanner is 9600DPI or 2.65 microns per pixel so I can now meet and even exceed that with the ability to vary the lighting to improve information gathering.

What bummer?

Mike Diamond has the coin and he expects to get to evaluating it late this week (he has many demands on his time and probably many coins ahead of mine). We may hear something from him as early as next week but as soon as he does have information for me I will share it here. I am still hoping that the fact that PCGS failed to see anything wrong with the coin will turn out as a positive for me and the value of the coin itself. That would of course violate my own mantra of buy the coin not the package but this time I might be selling not buying so I might let my scruples down. There is still not another coin like mine as far as I know but since it is a die caused error that possibility still exists and mine may qualify as the discovery coin if an article that describes it concisely can be published. It is my hope that once one or more articles are published that at least a few more of the coins show up. Right around one million silver proof Northern Mariana Islands coins were minted and if mine is truly one in a million that would be OK too.

Yes, I am upset that PCGS failed to do what I paid them to. I honestly help in the highest regard and made the (now known to be false) assumption that one of the reasons that they charged so much more than others for error attribution was that they had the best people on the job. Now that they screwed it up I think that it may be a good talking point for the coin. "Come see the coin PCGS insists is not an error!" Maybe if I can get an article written about the coin PCGS or a competitor will offer to authenticate and grade it as an error for free.

Mike Diamond has been extremely gracious. He offered to look the coin over without charge because it has piqued his interest. I pay all of the shipping and insurance of course but he is waiving his normal attribution fee because he wants to see the coin, in part because of the PCGS fiasco. I still wish I could get a look at the proof quarter presses in San Francisco because I think that if I could that I could figure out exactly what the die struck before it minted my coin.

Since neither the impact theory or the polish theory fully explain the coin, I propose combining them. I now suggest for your amusement, the impact-polish theory. The hammer (obverse) die hits the metal plate seen in this picture of a Canadian silver proof press



and then is sent to the rework shop where the crescent created by the impact is polished until the damage is removed. At this point it becomes clear that lapping the rest of the field down to meet the arc will render the die unusable and no further work is done. Then the die is accidentally sent to the production floor where several coins are minted before the mistake is discovered, my coin included.

This scenario requires a comedy of errors but they are all human errors and all individually plausible if die rework was still being done in San Francisco on the silver proof line in 2009 and if we use presses similar to the ones used in Canada. At least this combination theory can explain everything seen on the coin especially the near perfect arc that is slightly larger than a finished quarter and the level of polish on the raised field portion. In the Canadian press the reeding collar is well below that top plate and the anvil die rises after striking to push the coin up above the plate where it is removed by hand. Then another planchet is placed into the opening in the plate as the anvil descends and the next coin is struck twice before the process repeats.

I will definitely be writing it up for Coin World. Right now I'm waiting on a comparision specimen that might be useful in the analysis.

that's a very nice coin like die cracks.