less than 5000 Cheerios Dollar minted? - really only minted that many from the one die pair?
MsMorrisine
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i just find it hard to believe the mint made a die and then only used it on ~5,000-fewer coins
the mint has this nasty habit of seizing and melting unauthorized issues. did they know what they were doing and the destroyed the "cheerios" die so it wouldn't be used anymore? then, @CaptHenway posits, inventory got stale and they made more without the special die. Is that it?
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This is why i always wondered if any of the cheerios dollars might have shown up in the first day cover sets. But capt stated that he had not come across any.
I think it was 5500.
Disclaimer: I'm not a dealer, trader, grader, investor or professional numismatist. I'm just a hobbyist. (To protect me but mostly you! 🤣 )
As Tom D. Rogers told me when we chatted at a convention, he was still tinkering with the design in the Engraving Department and knew nothing about the Cheerios promotion.
The Cents were the star of the promotion. Somebody in a different Department did the deal with General Mills that required getting a bunch of 2000-dated Cent dies and striking 10 million 2000-dated Cents in 1999, early enough to get them packaged and in cereal boxes and on store shelves on Jan. 1, 2000. And, oh yeah, 5,500 of the new dollars, which only required one pair of dies. Oh look, here's a pair of dollar dies we can use. We know they struck a small quantity of the dollars to be used at that press conference I attended in October of 1999, so they probably just used that pair of Rogers' prototype dies.
The Coining Department struck the coins, Cents and Dollars, and delivered them to General Mills or the company hired by General Mills to do the packaging. Eventually Rogers finished his tinkering with the dies and produced a pair of Master Dies or Hubs or whatever and told the boys in the die shop to mass produce working dies. Those ended up in the coining presses and the used pair of prototype dies ended up getting scrapped. After all, the obverse die of that die pair was already showing some wear below the date (my die marker). Why reuse them?
TD
It also interesting that some of the Cheerios dollars were struck from regular issues dies that do not have the prototype reverse.
cost savings? they used unfinished proof dies in that time period
Thinking about it a lot further, I suppose it is possible that the prototype dollar die pair that struck the dollar coins used in the Cheerios promotion may have struck many more than the (presumed) 5,500 coins sent to General Mills plus the unknown number of coins taken to Chicago for the vending machine industry press conference, IF (and this is a mighty big IF) the dies were originally used in a mass striking run to see how well the prototype design both struck up and lasted.
Look at Roger Burdette's "Renaissance in American Coinage 1916-1921" book, and the Whitman Peace Dollar book, for stories about how the various 1922 prototype dollar dies were given significant striking runs to test them for striking characteristics and die life. Something similar may have been done with the prototype Sacagawea dies. Unfortunately, the Mint is useless as a source of information these days.
It has sometimes bothered me that my die marker below the date shows different die states, with first less and gradually more extra metal showing. There should not have been that much die erosion on a mere 5,500+ strikes, unless the die was improperly hardened or the cause of the die erosion (a feed finger maybe?) was particularly aggressive.
What if the die pair struck 50,000 or 100,000 or whatever coins in a test run, and the Cheerios coins and the Chicago press conference coins were pulled from that bin before the remainder were (presumably?) melted. I don't know. The idea just popped into my head 15 minutes ago and I need to think about it more.
TD
I like that idea. Does the mint have accessible records of the number of melted 2000 P dollars and dates of melting? That could help shed some light if such a document could be obtained.
OK, I emailed back and forth with Tom D. Rogers, and here is what I have.
Just from memory, he says that he made 16 different dies for the Sacagawea Dollar, with #16 being the accepted, normal reverse.
This does not mean 8 Obverses and 8 Reverses, as once the Obverse was deemed acceptable he would have stopped making Obverses and kept on making Reverses until #16 was deemed successful.
He did not say at what number he stopped making Obverses, so don't ask.
Each new die pair combination would have produced at least trial strikes, and possibly a test run. He did not say how long a trial strike or a test run might have been, as he did not do them. They were done by another Department. I would guess that that was Coining.
He did not know what happened to the coins produced during test strikes and/or trial runs. He said it was possible that they were rolled down into scrap, but this was just a guess. Again, that was done in another Department.
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So, it is possible that the 5,500 2000-P coins sent to General Mills or their packaging agent were taken from one of these test runs of an unknown number of strikings, but I have zero documentation of that. It is just an educated guess.
The pieces that I saw in Chicago in October of 1999 MIGHT or MIGHT NOT have been taken from the same test run. When I saw the regular design coins in January of 2000 I was sure that the tail feathers had been changed, but now a quarter of a century later I cannot swear that there were no other tiny differences between them and the Cheerios dollars. Either way the tail feathers make them patterns or prototypes or whatever you want to call them.
Finally, I need to compare the reverse of the gold strikes that went up on the Space Shuttle back in May or so of 1999 with a standard Cheerios Dollar to see if those reverses are exactly the same. It is possible that they have the exact same design but differ slightly in relief, but I don't think I could tell that from pictures.
TD