1921-P VAM Help

Holy cow, that reverse die is crushed.

I don't recall a 1921 VAM where that crack is mentioned - heck, I've never even seen a crack resembling the one through DOL in DOLLAR, much less one that prominent. That's just. plain. cool.

OK, enthusiasm notwithstanding, that's a break of sufficient size and uniqueness to warrant investigation. I will hazard a guess that it's listable, at least as a separate die state of a given VAM - VAM-1A to the existing VAM-1, or something like that. Don't quote me yet.

Excuse me for a day or two while I research. You're in luck - I go on vacation Thursday, which means 12-hour days at the computer.

That is an awesome die crack! I would have picked that up, too!

Yeah, definitely not the run of the mill stress crack caused by repetitive strikes which display a haphazard meandering.....This straight line and flowing curve type of connect the dots cracks illustrate a sudden demise of the reverse die.....I would not hesitate to say that there won't be too many of these floating around....I doubt that it is unique, but realistically an R-8 or R-7+.

Are these types of straight line cracks common on 1921s Dave?....Please when you get it, spend a few moments to zero in on the bottom portion of the 'O' in DOLLAR.....see what I am talking about? I am very interested in your findings about everything.

Yeah, I noticed the width of that D-O 'break' and wondered with such a substantial break, why it does not extend into the devices?....I'm not convinced (from the pictures anyway), that a 'traditional' break is actually what that is.....The thought had crossed my mind that the die may have flaked along the north side of the crack, giving the impression of a break...... (But 'that' is what a break actually is though isn't it)?.....I guess that I am lacking in the knowledge of what the accepted differentiation is between crack and break......I had always considered the presence of displaced metal (or lack of it) to be the identifier.

Let's look at the right obverse rim, shall we?



First 3 right stars:





Yeah, check out between the two stars:



Crack through the cap:



Yes, it goes all the way through:



This obverse die has serious problems, with more to come.

OK, I have an attribution. VAM-39A.

I *knew* I'd seen that straight-line crack across the star before; it, along with the dot on the wing, are the only attributes shown on the VAMworld page for 39A. This is what infuriates me about VAMming.

It took me 15 minutes to shoot 32 images of your coin, including resetting my camera for the detail pics. My camera, a low-end dSLR with an admittedly nice lens, is capable of enough resolution to illustrate all but the very tiniest star quadrupling, for a total cost of less than $1000. Most of what I posted here is scaled down to 25% or less - the LIBERTY pic is an indication of what it's capable of.

Yet people who will cheerfully spend $1000 on an MS66 Morgan won't take the price of one coin to duplicate my efforts? With a camera as good as mine, about $50 in lighting and half an hour of face time, I can teach anyone to take pictures of this quality. It's not rocket science.

It just burns me. How many VAMs out there have smoking-gun features you could see in an ebay pic? A whale of a lot more than we know about. The line between the IB on the obverse of your coin, or the stuff between the 6th and 7th stars, would enable attribution without ever seeing the reverse. If you knew to look.

I'm gonna burn all this to disk and send it along with the coin, nlp. Will be back on the reverse details in moments - I got dragged away by the minor matter of feeding myself.

Whoa.....(is that the same coin?)......I cannot recall ever looking at the Photography Forum before (still haven't), and ignorantly looked upon it as a totally disinteresting forum.....I can certainly see the true virtue in such an art now (all of a sudden).