Nice little surprise - 1873-CC Trade Dollar FS-301 MPD

SPalladino

I recently purchased a PCGS AU Details (cleaning) 1873-CC coin to add to my Carson City collection. I was pleasantly surprised to find that is was an unattributed FS-301 MPD. While apparently not creating more value, I'll, nevertheless, send it back into our host for proper attribution and labeling.

ricko

@SPalladino ... Nice pictures... Can you post full images? I like the CC Trade dollars.... Cheers, RickO

SPalladino

@ricko said:
@SPalladino ... Nice pictures... Can you post full images? I like the CC Trade dollars.... Cheers, RickO

Sure thing. I'll take and post them later this afternoon. (no trueviews available at this point)

LanceNewmanOCC

ok, that is neat.

i'm not accustomed to seeing such a large digit in the dentils like that, even with morgans.

oih82w8

Sure looks like the top of a 7 to me. Nice one!

Since it is a cleaned coin, I would not send it in for Variety Attribution, but its your coin.

Crypto

Cool thing is there are two different significant MPDs for the 73cc. Also the FS301 is know with three different rev dies to include the ultra rare very wide 1.2mm CC and the very scarce 1.0wide. In fact all 1.2mm very wide CCs are the FS301

shish

Why hasn't the completed Trade Dollar book been published?
Many numismatists contributed their information and time to this book.
The author told us multiple times that he would publish the book.
The years have pasted, nothing but excuses and empty promises.

NumisOxide

Nice catch!

SPalladino

@Crypto said:
Cool thing is there are two different significant MPDs for the 73cc. Also the FS301 is know with three different rev dies to include the ultra rare very wide 1.2mm CC and the very scarce 1.0wide. In fact all 1.2mm very wide CCs are the FS301

Thank you. I appreciated the shared knowledge.
I was aware of at least two reverse die marriages, but not three. Mine is certainly not the 1.2mm wide CC - the left C on that one lies further to the left that mine (left part of the C aligning about with the right upright of the N above).

SPalladino

Not great photos, but here you go, @ricko

ricko

@SPalladino ... Thanks for the pictures..... Nice looking Trade dollar... Cheers, RickO

kaz

has anyone ever adequately explained how the top of a digit ends up all the way down in the dentils?

SPalladino

@kaz said:
has anyone ever adequately explained how the top of a digit ends up all the way down in the dentils?

.
Per Wexler's Coins and Die Varieties:

Specialists still do not agree on a reason for these very widely misplaced digits. Kevin Flynn wrote a book about the misplaced date varieties entitled Two Dates Are Better Than One – A Collector’s Guide to Misplaced Dates. It is the only reference that I am aware of that deals exclusively with the misplaced date varieties. In that book numerous hobby specialists offer their thoughts as to why the digits in the date are so widely misplaced on these varieties.

Crypto

@kaz said:
has anyone ever adequately explained how the top of a digit ends up all the way down in the dentils?

just going off basic physics I would guess punch hop where the worker is deploying downward pressure and the opposite and equal reaction causes it to skip during the strike into the edge recesses of the dentials which due to their voids offer less resistance and more problems polishing off mistakes. Remembering that the details are the low points and the fields easiest to polish, there are also examples in numismatics of numerals in devices in the center of the coin too.

SPalladino

Just following up:
I sent it back to get attributed and reholdered, given that there are only 5 that are straight-graded in PCGS holders (none in NGC or ANACS holders) - even though this one was in a AU Details PCGS holder before I sent it in.

I would love to find out if this coin has any sisters in PCGS details holders (ie, what the straight graded + details population is for a FS-301). Unfortunately/apparently PCGS does not provide details populations in their pop report (NGC and ANACS each provide details populations).

Question: Is there any way to access a PCGS pop report for details coins? (apparently not, but I'll ask here anyway)
Assuming that there is not, I wonder why that is the case.

True Views

LanceNewmanOCC

anyone that has ever used the little punches know they are a major P.I.A. ! the ones i used were a bit bigger than the ones the mint used and i found them VERY difficult to get perfectly flat and in-place consistently and probably made several rpd/rpm for the stuff i was working on (non-coins) w/o even realizing it or caring other than the annoyance of it taking longer than i wanted to do it right/well.

trying to get it back into the tilted/weak or whatever letter/number is nearly impossible which is why we see so many "split serif" rpms that are only doubled by notches at the top/bottom of the series usually. MICRO rotation to the human eye/hands.

what boggles my mind is with all their knowledge/machinery etc, the didn't have more of a consistent cutting/punching area for the dies for dates/mm etc. THANKFULLY because we get some very cool representations of human behavior/character represented in the coins in myriad forms.

LanceNewmanOCC

@SPalladino said:

@kaz said:
has anyone ever adequately explained how the top of a digit ends up all the way down in the dentils?

.
Per Wexler's Coins and Die Varieties:

Specialists still do not agree on a reason for these very widely misplaced digits. Kevin Flynn wrote a book about the misplaced date varieties entitled Two Dates Are Better Than One – A Collector’s Guide to Misplaced Dates. It is the only reference that I am aware of that deals exclusively with the misplaced date varieties. In that book numerous hobby specialists offer their thoughts as to why the digits in the date are so widely misplaced on these varieties.

thanks for the link and in 2 paragraphs explains to me why i feel so uncomfortable talking about/trying to understand hubs/dies transferring etc and here is why: (no offense intended to the author as i am referencing the process(es) not kill the messenger
.
.

"""""
During the earliest days at the U.S. Mint, from 1792 through 1836, the Mint did not have any reduction lathes to transfer the coin’s design from a galvano to a master hub. Rather, a Mint engraver carved the central design for a coin directly into the face of the master die. The design elements around the rim such as the motto, the date, and/or the stars did not appear on the master die.

When completed, the _master die _was placed in a hubbing press where it was used to make working hubs. Like the master die, these working hubs only contained the central design for the coins. The _working hubs _ were then used in the hubbing press to make the working dies which at this point contained only the central design elements.
"""""

from master hubs to working dies, there is a LOT lost in translation and going from posiitives to negatives which creates a LOOOOOOT of room for things to happen that just confuses the crap outta me. BECAUSE just like counter-clashes, going back and forth that many times from a master hub through several steps to a working die. there can be a lot of things that can happen and becomes difficult to understand absolutely and where precisely in the process they happened.

broken letters are a GREAT case-in-point. the broken letter had to have happened before the working dies as it is imperceptible to detect that something was broken but looks just like it was designed that way, which they weren't of course.

when you look at dies that are posted, notice the VERY small working area from the quintessential area of a reverse mm below the wreath to the edge of the die, it is NOT much room and with a big a$$ hand in the way and having to hold it just right AND strike it with a hammer or something, it is a wonder we dont have even more rpm/omm/mis-place mm etc than we do, even though we have a plethora of them.

here is an exercise for anyone wanting some appreciate for the difficulty to manually punch mm/digitits. get a AA battery (the punch), hold it over something only a couple inches in diameter or smaller, hold the battery over it like you are going to hit it with a hammer in the other hand, notice you CANNOT see where you are punching unless you look from the side which is VERY awkward when you are thinking about swinging a hammer to hit the punch. it takes some coordination and care for obvious reasons. OOF

kaz

Ex-Crypto set:

keoj

The other 73-CC MPD (8 and 7 mispunched)....image below.

Yeah, yeah....its clear that I'll finish the book when I retire (which I hope to be soon)!

PCGS does not recognize this variety yet. Both the MPD 7 and the MPD 7 & 8 are both sort of common with the 7 being slightly more scarce.

The other theory is that person adding the MM's used the edge to do a test punch prior to die hardening.

keoj

keoj

PS...the MPD 7 in my collection is a PCGS 55.

https://www.pcgs.com/setregistry/dollars/trade-dollars-specialty-sets/trade-dollars-complete-variety-set-circulation-strikes-1873-1878/publishedset/72424

SPalladino

@keoj - thank you for adding to the thread. And, thank you for sharing your set - I really appreciated looking through it. Two of the five straight-graded 1873-CC FS-301 coins accounted for.

LanceNewmanOCC

@keoj said:
The other 73-CC MPD (8 and 7 mispunched)....image below.

the 8 seems pretty obvious but i'm not so sure about the 7. i would say the 7 was just kinda tilted but the middle bar is pretty strong and i would have expected the left top serif of the 7, which is kinda long would have more of it present there. obviously it is something but looks a bit off for a 7 but what the heck else can it be?!?!?

gr8 image btw as i was able to blow that sucker up BIG w/o pixelation.

alefzero

It is a really interesting obverse. As was previously mentioned, it was paired with a few different reverse dies, one of them being quite rare. There is another MPD, not in the CPG, that I find even more interesting though is not particularly rare. It arguably has the entire date misplaced in the denticles and has a very distinct reverse die which, like some for this obverse, were reused in subsequent years in Carson City.

As for a guide or book, the work I did is presented at the SSDC Registry public area. I need to port some updates there and plan to redo it is a much more organized and usable fashion. But there is good stuff available there already.

It is interesting that there are two MPDs for 1873-CC, but none identified for 1873 or 1873-S and, unlike with Morgans, not at all a common phenomenon for Trade dollars. I did find a new one for 1876-S (Type I/I) very recently.

Here is the link to the Trade material. It should look nicer soon enough. Just buries in end of 2022 business stuff and other life priorities.

http://registry.ssdcvams.com/Trade/

keoj

Here's a 3rd....on the Trader73 Trade Dollar collection...retired.

This is paired with the wide CC (1 mm) reverse.

https://www.pcgs.com/setregistry/mycoinfacts/1873-cc-mpd-fs-301/1888351/96692

I'll add another image for the 76-S at some point to the one above.........cool coin, I just was never quite 100% sure that it was a RPM (looks like it but just not as distinct as I would hope for for a MPD designation.

keoj

OriginalDan

@SPalladino said:
@keoj - thank you for adding to the thread. And, thank you for sharing your set - I really appreciated looking through it. Two of the five straight-graded 1873-CC FS-301 coins accounted for.

I think many of the 73-CC's are this variety, and this being the case not too many people want to pay the variety fee. Mostly just the variety set guys (which there aren't many). Thus, the PCGS population for this variety is much smaller than reality.

Still, neat variety and any 73-CC trade dollar is a special coin.

lermish

Congrats on a very nice coin!!!

I can't tell if mine has the RPD or it's just a rim bump:

vulcanize

Very interesting indeed.

Thanks for the insights and links.

SPalladino

@OriginalDan said:
I think many of the 73-CC's are this variety, and this being the case not too many people want to pay the variety fee. Mostly just the variety set guys (which there aren't many). Thus, the PCGS population for this variety is much smaller than reality.

No disagreement.

Some related additional information:

Four pairs of dies made: Four pairs of trade dollar dies, made in Philadelphia (where all dies for all mints were made), were received in Carson City on July 22, 1873. It is not known if all dies were used; probably most were, as they did not last long, averaging only about 15,000 impressions per die pair. Coinage began immediately, and on the following day, 4,500 pieces were ready for shipment, and 2,580 coins were paid out to local depositors, this being the first circulation of the denomination in the West. Four more pairs followed, two sent from Philadelphia on October 18th, two more at an unknown date. All had small CC mintmarks.

(https://www.pcgs.com/coinfacts/coin/1873-cc-t-1-trade/7032)

So, perhaps roughly 15,000 originally minted with this obverse die (assuming average obverse die life)...(or, perhaps roughly 12% +/- few percent of the original mintage, assuming that 8 obverse dies were used for the original 124,500 minted). Then, one must consider how many of the originally minted were lost for various reasons, and how many of the remaining are worn to the point of challenged attribution.