Does anyone know who at the mint came up with the term "Special Mint Sets" and is that mon
SanctionII
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If anyone knows who came up with the term and the story behind its creation and use, please share same with us. Further, now that about 40 years have passed since the first SMS sets were made, do you believe that "Special Mint Sets" is a suitable name for these sets. IMHO some of the coins in these sets are truly "special" but most of the individual coins and quiet possibly all of the complete sets are not. In fact smoe coins and smoe sets are downright fugly.
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The 1965 sets weren't very special all and were pretty much junk IMO. The 1966 and '67 sets were better quality, but still far too many coins had obvious handling marks, which stinks given the higer prices the mint charged them. The coins were inferior quality for the most part, were made of base metal and yet cost more than twice as much as the previous Proof sets.
Most of the SMS coins were practically proofs except they were struck only once. While
several different means of die, and planchet preraration were employed for these sets
the one which prevailed was nearly the basis for all the later mint sets. These used
basined dies in old single vertical presses. They were struck with higher pressure and
at lower speeds with dies which were swapped out frequently. The coins were washed
and dried. Many of the dies were frosted when placed in use and a very few were pol-
ished. Most planchets were pretty standard but there were a few that were polished. No
coins were intentionally struck twice though it was apparently not uncommon for this to
happen.
In future years these same techniques were employed for mint set coins except that the
dies are never fully basined. There are a few burnished or polished planchets.
While quality of these coins isn't always very good, they do tend to be far superior to the
coins made for circulation. The (circulation issues) '65 coins were struck mostly on very heavily worn dies and
the '66 was struck by poorly aligned dies. These, too, were often quite worn. There was
some improvement in '67 and more in 1970 but these early issues are quite poorly made.
Mint set coins tend to be far better though often heavily marked (especially after the SMS's)
The fact that they retained many of the characteristics for mint set coins first used for the
SMS's is one of the more important changes during this era.