Whats Going On With This Wheatie?!

Very nice find! Peace out!

It is a NICE Error! As coppercoins said, the obverse is well struck, the reverse is missing a portion that fell away after the strike. Call it a lamination error, a delamination error or a partial split planchet after the strike.

Some might argue with the last description but either of the three descriptions are good for this coin.

The strike itself is probably what dislodged the chunk of planchet. What you're seeing at the top as raised metal, is the effect of the (lose upon impact) planchet piece being pushed into the other portion of the planchet.

Just as a foreign object pushed very hard will cause deep gouges, so will 2 pieces of coper under the tons per square inch pressure of a cent die press.

In less than a tiny fraction of a second, the dies compressed on the planchet that had serious structural integrity issues.
As this happened, it dislodged the portion of planchet which is missing from the reverse.
When said piece was dislodged, it was simultaneously pushed against the larger portion of planchet, under incredible pressure.
Then coin was ejected from the dies, probably dislodging the smaller, missing portion of the planchet at the same time.

This all happened more quickly than the time it takes to blink your eye- no I'm not exaggerating.

When such things occur under intense pressure and incredible speed, the result only has one appearance. There's nothing else like it.

Think of 2 metal bars- one is bent by slowly applying pressure. The other is snapped in two, like a twig. If you look at their stress points, they will look very different, even though they were identical metal bars. The bar that was snapped will have obvious signs of QUICK and great pressure. On the bent bar, pressure was obviously applied more gradually.
What I'm trying to illustrate is that under the minting process, some of the ways that metal reacts is not possible to replicate through damage. I tried to show why, I'm afraid my metaphor may fall flat.....

thanks liveanddie,

I could not tell from a 2D image if the metal was rasied higher then the rim , If I had seen a pic at more angles it would appear eazier to tell,

My question was what you mentioned " the metal looked higher then the rim and pushed way up " It appears in the pic to maybe/maybe not be higher then the rim and letters around it , so the loose metal was impacted by the die and made a " crater like " appearane pushing some metal outwards.

I was not aware of this every lamination I seen online appears to just have pieces fallen out and a void left behind,
this is the first I seen the delamination metal leave a huge " crater like impact " thats why I thought it might be PMD struck after the mint by some object that pushed the metal up.

Becuase I thought even with a loose piece of delaminated metal it would still be mashed so hard and fast bythe die it would cuase the fields around the loose metal to be flat.

I have also never seen one this big before , most are smaller delaminations

Thanks for the info. I'm gonna have to look closer next dime I get a damaged coin and do more investigating how the damage was cuased

Liveanddievarieties,

That was a great explanation:-) of how that coin ended up looking the way it does:-)

Thanks,
Bill

lol, nice.