"wacked out" 3 cent piece with errors..Opinions please

clevegreg

I bought this 3 cent piece recently, and was looking at it under my loupe yesterday. The die must have cracked, or the planchet had a defect because it certainly has some "issues". On the obverse, all of the lettering is doubled, and there is a small "hole" at about 8:30 of the scan below. On the reverse, you can see where the metal flowed through this "hole" and ran all the way up to 12:00 putting an extra layer of metal on the devices. I haven't seen one of these before...kind of cool. I tried my best with my scanner, but these coins are pretty tiny. Tell me what you think!

Greg

Obverse

Reverse

Mark

clevegreg:

That's a "cud" on the obverse rim, isn't it? Also, the little of the reverse that is shown makes it appear that the die was clashed--can you see an outline of liberty on the reverse and an outline of the vertical lines from the III on the obverse? (I think die clashed 3 cent pieces are cool. They interest my wife, which is difficult to do with coins, and they are sufficiently common that I can show her pictures of these at relatively frequent intervals.) I think your coin is also nifty, because the extent of the problems shows the pressure the mint was under to get these coins minted and circulating. They also show the mint's difficulty in working with nickel.

Mark

kryptonitecomics

That's funny I bought an 1865 3 Cent Nickel on Saturday that had some major die cracks and doubling as well??? It also has a raised line that goes inder one of the roman numerals on the reverse, and I believe some die clashes as well. It must be pretty common to see some of these defects on these old coins, but I wonder if they are attributable to a certain die or die state.

Mark

kryptonitecomics:

When you see the raised line under the III on the reverse, I betcha that's a die clash and it's the outline of liberty from the obverse die. From my less-than-scientific study of 3-cent pieces, the 1865 issue seems the most prone 3-cent nickel piece to die clashes. As I said before, I think clashed dies are neat but from what I read on the PCGS page with MS 3-cent nickel registry sets (namely, "This [MS 3-cent nickels] set is a great challenge, as there are numerous problems with poor strikes, subdued luster, heavily clashed dies and other negative characteristics.") apparently clashed dies are considered a drawback to most (?) collectors...

Mark

KINCOIN

The coin has multiple errors on it. It has a cud, cracked die, doubling in the date and a lamination error. Its the heinze 57 of error coins all in one. Very interesting coin.

KINGCOIN KING OF COINS

clevegreg

I think I will send it into ANACS to see how many attributions they can fit on a label

Greg

BigD5

Did you check Cherrypickers? There are a lot of different varieties of overdates etc. for 3cN's. I am sending one off to Anacs tomorrow. A Breen#2413.