What is the cause of this excess material?

in2Coins

CaptHenway

It might help if we knew what the item was.

lcutler

Looks like some microscopic shearing of the metal from striking. Nothing out of the ordinary, with that much magnification even the normal looks different.

Greenstang

Reduce the magnification to 10 and then let’s see what it looks like.

in2Coins

@CaptHenway said:
It might help if we knew what the item was.

2017 S Enhanced Quarter Set.

in2Coins

@Greenstang said:
Reduce the magnification to 10 and then let’s see what it looks like.

It is hardly visible. Was just curious…

Steven59

Upflow of metal into the dies devices. That's why most of us use maybe 10X to 20x power to view coins.

CaptHenway

For the record, this is the Missouri quarter in that set. When asking questions it helps to give basic information like that.

It does seem to be some sort of mechanical damage to the die during the die preparation process. I do not know what might have caused the die damage.

ricko

Particularly the first picture, looks like die work that was not smoothed over. Cheers, RickO

Aspie_Rocco

I agree with Ricko in that is seems like die work. It has the look of die polish lines or gouges that were removed from the fields but not entirely removed from the letters.