2004 texas quarters and die cracks

sammydabull

i recently picked up a roll of uncirculated 2004 texas state quarters and out of them i pulled about 15 of these ( i presume) die cracked quarters out. all are similar and have a line following the ridge from mouth to nose, and a few have blobs under the eyes.....

what do you guys think this is?

Shamika

That's the "Crying George" variety.

sammydabull

<< <i>That's the "Crying George" variety. >>

mhammerman

I got a couple of rolls of uncs. and one of the rolls has a splotch on the reverse at the star, on the left side. Someone else described this anomaly and posted a photo of it. This coin is going to have some interesting varieties before it is all over.

Shamika

Actually, it could be called the "Sweat'n George" variety too.

buffnut

A knife-fight scar and an unsightly wart.

ms70

Looks & sounds more like die chips than cracks.

mhammerman

Well, this is a curious issue and since we didnt actually see what happened, we have to either distill it down to what we do know or find an example where this has happened before and been figured out.

In order for that area to be raised on the coin as it appears, the die would to have been weaker than the planchet because the planchet eroded into the die...the only way there could be a raised area unless that part of the planchet was missing in the first place and that is probably not the case. I say that it is probably not just a chipped because of the roundedness of the imperfection although wear would certainly "round out" an eroded part of the planchet.

It could be that there was water on the die during some strikes but I'm trying to understand how this could happen. Water doesnt compress so if there is water between a die and a softer planchet, it seems the water (or maybe oil) was on the die would still cause the image to be placed on the planchet and not the other way around. So, this situation is not like that. If maybe the die was not a uniform consistency and there was some kind of imperfection in the die that lead to the erosion of some of the surface, then it could happen that the planchet was stronger than the die and with the oil/water idea, this would yield a smooth, round impression on the planchet as the oil/water would be trapped in the imperfection of the die and erode into the die causing a strike like this.

Of course the opposite may be true, there may be imperfections in the planchet where by the planchet was stronger than the die but this seems unlikely since planchets were mostly of uniform composition when they are liquid metal.

The stripe on Fightin' George's face is obviously from a knife fight or a die crack but the tears...hummmmmmm. Let's see if there is someone that has seen this on another coin and knows what caused it to happen there. Hey...where's our minting experts here on the forum?

Good luck figurin this out.

sammydabull

excellent info! thanks!

Ill get some more pics up tomorrow afternoon of some of the others...i think i pulled 23 out of one roll all similar, then no more were found...

sammydabull

Heres one more, kind of hard to get these pics, i only have a HP Photosmart 320 2.1MP...

sammydabull

no further comments from anyone?