Repair marks on Franklin dies.
dlimb2
Posts: 3,449
I have a couple of Frankies which have very small scratch marks, to small for cleaning marks, like in the area of the last digit of the date and also radiating out from In God....These lines appear as though that someone at the mint was repairing the dies.....has anyone else seen this on their Frankies...
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Comments
Frank
The diagonal lines are die polish lines
The white looking horizonal lines are hairlines from a cleaning.
IMO
The reason the dies are polished is to get more life out of the dies, and to give a more uniform strike.
To see what a coin looks like made from unkept dies, unkept meaning not polished when needed,look at alot of 1982 and `83 nickels for example. The fields are sometimes distorted and otherwise not smooth or show very uniform flowlines, that would be a sign of `healthy` dies.
Again the ridgey surface of the fields in some areas could be from late die state, or deteriorating dies.
Sometimes you see heavy die polish lines and are often mistaken for scratches from a post-strike cleaning.
Three very different lines to be aware of.
1) Flowlines= naturally ocurring
2) Die polish lines= pre-strike `mint-made lines, very acceptable
3) Hairlines= post-strike cleaning causes this one, very bad and not acceptable.
very very hard to see sometimes especially to the untrained eye.
Bad ol` hairlines are grooves or valeys into the surface of the coin.
Flowlines however are somewhat both ridges and valleys. Together they form the surface
of the coin. These lines caused by the metal flow range in various sizes depending on the
state of the dies. Very new dies strike proof or prooflike coins and as the dies wear the flowlines
seen begin to get more and more visible to the naked eye.
Later die state coins have huge flow lines or more gaps in the lines that form.
Start looking at coins to notice about what stage the dies were that struck the coin.
I like to pick out some of those new pennies with PL fields. You just know those were
struck on brand new dies.
Some coins struck on late die state dies can have a nice look also. The luster, or cartwheel
effect seems to increase as the dies become more worn.
i guess at some point there are diminishing returns.
from deteriorating dies the cartwheel effect may become distorted as less uniformity
of metal flow occurs so would the visual affect of the luster or cartwheel effect.
saying the late die state coin has `more` luster than an ealier die state coin may be misleading.
it may seem so but, to say it is, may not be entirely true.
`more` luster could just mean a different looking kind of luster.
know what i mean?
guess it depends on what you think more means when viewing luster on a coin.
they.re all connected to one another in the sense of what we see on the coins surface.
Bring the coins to the Lemont show tomorrow, and I'll take a look at them.
Greg