Repaired Coins

Does anyone know what PCGS means when it puts "Repaired" on a coin holder. I am imagining this means something like a hole was drilled in the coin and someone has repaired it. Not sure if that is true or not. Thanks for any information.
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It can also mean solder was removed from a jewelry coin or marks were smoothed over by burnishing. I'm not sure where "tooling" comes in compared to the "repaired" description.
Worry is the interest you pay on a debt you may not owe.
"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value---zero."----Voltaire
"Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said."----Voltaire
If a coin had a hole, which has been filled, it’s typically labeled “plugged”, not “repaired”. I’ve seen numerous “repaired” coins whose surfaces look to have been lightly to heavily worked on - such as marks/flaws having been removed or minimized and the fields cleaned or polished. Some repaired coins look decent to pretty good to acceptable, while others look grossly unoriginal.
Mark Feld* of Heritage Auctions*Unless otherwise noted, my posts here represent my personal opinions.
I believe @MFeld has given an excellent description of the relative terms. Most of the different levels are detectable if studied, though I hear there are a couple of experts out there who can effect repairs that are virtually undetectable. Cheers, RickO
Thanks for the information. I didn't know repaired holes were given their own descriptive.
However, now I wonder what the difference is between repaired and tooled?
Sometime the design features on a well worn coin are strengthened by tooling the design features to resemble a higher graded coin. This wouldn't be a repair but it would be an alteration.
Worry is the interest you pay on a debt you may not owe.
"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value---zero."----Voltaire
"Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said."----Voltaire
I remember lot viewing a 61-D $1G that was in a PCGS slab with the designation “tooled”. Nobody sitting by me including some well respected coin people were able to tell why the coin had such a designation.
I just purchased this graded by NGC as AU details obverse repaired. If you look at the three o’clock position, you can see where there was probably a jewelers mount

A wild guess, sometimes "tooled" means verdigris was removed with a dental tool of sorts. Unless you know exactly what to look for, it is easily missed. A slight change in the color of the planchet is a 'tell.'
peacockcoins
"Tooling" is where "missing" details (like hair, feathers, or clothing folds) are re-engraved onto a worn coin, in an attempt to make it look less worn. It's more commonly seen on ancient coins, rather than moderns, because it's a lot harder to believably replicate the original coin design using engraving tools when that design is on a mass-produced machine-struck coin whose design is well-known, well-documented, and replicated on thousands of otherwise-identical coins.
"Repairing" and "tooling" can be done simultaneously. Suppose a coin has a hole drilled in it right through the obverse legend on a coin. "Repairing" would be the act of filling in the hole; "tooling" would be engraving onto the repair plug the missing details of the original legend. Tooling in this case may spill over outside of the actual repaired area, as the tooler attempts to match his artwork with the remaining design on the rest of the coin.
Bear in mind that historically, repairing and tooling wasn't always done to try to fool a collector. A hundred years ago or more, if you were had a coin that had a hole drilled in it for jewellery and wanted to spend it as a coin again, you might want to try to repair and hide that hole before spending it. Coins with holes drilled in them were often treated with suspicion, because a common practice when a storekeeper detected a counterfeit coin was for them to nail it to the wall.
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations"
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