Options
1795 Cohen 5b thick planchet Half Cent Rarity 4 to 5 ?? 107 grains
coinloverjon
Posts: 102 ✭✭✭
I love these old half cents, because the mint would use dies until they were useless, because they were so labor intensive to make.
This is one of my favorites.
They also had a copper shortage that year, so they were scrounging for blanks.
Here they used a cracked reverse die and a damaged, clipped, planchet, cut from a spoiled large cent.
This is the rarer, thicker variety. 107 grains.
A 1795 Cohen 5b, Rarity 4 or 5 [depending who you ask]
The dates on a lot of these were weak at best. This one is almost gone, only partially visible, under the right lighting.
1
Comments
Thanks for the picture and information.... and I would be proud to have that even in such condition... Cheers, RickO
The roughness and crudeness of the coin is what appealed to me
Here were these guys, 224 years ago, at the new mint [picture below], trying, with hand tools, to get out a decent product, with what they had to work with.
Every one of these early dies was hand punched, with leaves, berries, letters and numerals, then hardened. Then after 3-4 days of work, some of the dies [examples of screw type dies and presses, below ] would crack, either when hardening, or early in their usage. Then the mint would mix and match reverse and obverse dies to complete the job of making coins. This is why there are so many varieties each with subtle differences . Then they were put into the press and made one coin at a time.
And they were all made in Philadelphia, so all of the Founding Fathers probably probably used them for trade.
Jon
The latest estimate on the Rarity of these is an R-4 (Very Scarce) ( 76 to 200 estimated.)
Jon