Any mintage numbers on the 79' Wide Rim SBA?

copperfan · August 27, 2008 8:28AM

Is there a known mintage for these coins, or an estimate?

Thanks in advance for any help.

nicetoning42107 · August 27, 2008 9:09AM

Breen says it's about 45% of the entire mintage. There must be whole hoards of these if that's the case since a cherrypick at Joe Bank will net you about 2 wide rims for every 100 1979-P you look at.

rgCoinGuy · August 27, 2008 9:18AM

<< Breen says it's about 45% of the entire mintage. There must be whole hoards of these if that's the case since a cherrypick at Joe Bank will net you about 2 wide rims for every 100 1979-P you look at. >>

Interesting, anyone have any other estimates from anyone not known to make up figures in his work?

coolest · August 27, 2008 9:20AM

<< Breen says it's about 45% of the entire mintage. There must be whole hoards of these if that's the case since a cherrypick at Joe Bank will net you about 2 wide rims for every 100 1979-P you look at. >>

Breen must have made a very bad guess. I'm sure that the true number is much less than 2%. I have looked at a few dozen of the first day coin packages and found only two. And supposedly they were only produced with one die that was used at the earliest stage of production and if that is the case most of the first day coins should be Wide rims and they are not.

percyb · August 27, 2008 9:27AM

I've yet to find one at a coin show.

reds · August 27, 2008 9:29AM

I found a couple hundred looking through mixed rolls of SBA's and Sacs. Hundreds of rolls

ModernDollarNut · August 27, 2008 10:41AM

I think Breen's figures come from a letter the Mint sent to Herb Hicks (I think- have a copy of the letter from Herb kicking around somewhere) stating that that percentage of 1979-P dies were of the Wide Rim variety.

I've not seen that information anywhere else and if I've learning anything in my full-time Ike research it is that Mint letters and quotes can not be taken at face value. Of everything the Mint does well, its most supreme skill has been releasing for public consumption misleading information.

I've looked through about a hundred 79-P rolls and roughly 25 bags of 100 and one bag of 1000 and find roughly 1-2 per 100 WR's.

Of all of these, the highest PCGS grade I've made is 65 and darn few of those. For some reason, they are usually the ugliest ducks in the bag or roll, also prone to corrosion.

When they were minted is an interesting question: quite a few (maybe one in ten) show up in advertising cards put together by banks and fund raisers from '79-P's pulled from the first day's release. But the FRB storage vaults, stocked full in anticiplation of the first day of release, were filled first to the rear of each vault, just common sense, hence "first in, last out" (think it through!).

Are there vast stores of Wide Rims hidden in bank vaults somewhere? Because of that one Mint letter to Herb Hicks, authorities seem to be hedging their bets. Personally, I will be surprised if troves of WR's suddenly appear, though small concentrations locked for now in unsearched SBA bags are to be expected. Rob Ezerman

Rob

ProofArtworkonCircs · August 27, 2008 3:25PM

Rob, I would go with your number of 1 or 2 % are wide rim.
Suposedly the wide rim was version 2 of the SBA, yet they were around in limited quanities for day 1 of the original release.
I suspect the mint letter might have been well intentioned. I consider it possible that they gave the true number of dies.
As usual, the mint had high hopes of producing many new dollar coins. Yet the demand and mintage figures dropped towards the end of the year. I suspect they had a large number of wide rim dies in anticipation of continuing large scale production. When this did not happen, they were stuck with a pile of dies with the 1979 date on them that they could not use. Because of that mint letter, I never spent money to accumalate wide rims but instead waited for the government release of a flood of them. Oh well, that is not the first time nor last time I was wrong.

copperfan · August 27, 2008 4:02PM

I also thought they were more scarce than the normal rim coins. IIRC Bowers wrote something about it in one of his books.

Maybe "Collecting & Investing in Rare Coins."

Ill have to check that book out to see if Im right.

Thanks for all the help.

Ive pulled from circulation somewhere around 30-40. Mostly low BU and high AU, but afew nice pieces. The hunt continues......

cladking · August 27, 2008 4:08PM

I once figured 3% based on sampling from all over the country. We didn't count
batches except as one point so this could have thrown the number off.

It's probably very safe to say it's between 1.5 and 4%.

It seems a lot of these went to the middle of the country. ...or at least unmixed
ones.

copperfan · August 27, 2008 4:09PM

Thanks cladking.

Now, one last thing while I got you here,

Whats the mintage for the normal 79's? Im sure its somewhere easy to find, but Im lazy...

cladking · August 27, 2008 4:09PM

<< 
Thanks for all the help.

Ive pulled from circulation somewhere around 30-40. Mostly low BU and high AU, but afew nice pieces. The hunt continues...... >>

So how many coins do you think you've looked at?

cladking · August 27, 2008 4:11PM

<< Thanks cladking.

Now, one last thing while I got you here,

Whats the mintage for the normal 79's? Im sure its somewhere easy to find, but Im lazy...

>>

Krause lists the combined mintage without the mint set coins at 360,222,000.

cladking · August 27, 2008 4:12PM

...And there are no wide rims in the mint sets though there are a few in the souvenir sets.

Souvenir set mintage was probably around 100,000 and is included in the 322 million number.

copperfan · August 27, 2008 4:22PM

WOW! I knew you would come through with some great info, thanks!

I have looked at maybe 300-400 in the last 6 months and the 30-40, I cant remember excatly how many, were the wide rims.

Personally I stash them all. For face, why not.

sumnom · August 27, 2008 4:30PM

Let us remember that the time of mintage had nothing to do with the time of release. The fact that some wide rims were to be found among the coins first release tells us nothing about when the coin was minted, other than that it wasn't minted after it was released

It has long been my understanding that the wide rims were to be found among the last coins produced with the date 1979. Wasn't the change made late in the production run?

kranky · August 27, 2008 9:02PM

FWIW, a few years ago I went through about 300 1979 SBA's that a non-collector had squirreled away, and found 4 wide rims.

cladking · August 28, 2008 1:18AM

<< WOW! I knew you would come through with some great info, thanks!
) >>

The question is is it accurate.

Mintage on the souvenir set is about a guess and the incidence of the wide rims isn't much more than one. It was not really a scientific sampling and a lot of coins were excluded because they were found together and from the same dies.

ProofArtworkonCircs · August 28, 2008 3:54AM

Here follows some history of this variety, that I was able to find this morning.

I first had the pleasure of documenting this variety as a die variety in the May 1980 issue of Error-Variety News.

By 1981 two national coin publications were publishing that it was only a worn hub.

John Wexler of EVN wrote the mint and received an Answer dated August 5, 1981 from Alan J. Goldman, Deputy Director of the Mint.
"The 'close date-rim alignment' coins are neither the result of a worn hub nor a design modification done to elininate die cracks, but a design modification to enhance the appearance of the coin."

" The correct explanation is that the border on the obverse of the later 1979-P and all of the 1980 issues was widen to provide a more balanced appearance with respect to both obverse and reverse borders. Hence, the border was moved closed to the date.

Mr. Wexler received another answer January 18, 1983 from George E. Hunter, Ph. D., Assistant Director for Technology.
"The best information I can obtain on this subject is that there were 643 Type II, near date, wide border obverse dies used at the Philadelphia Mint in 1979. With an estimated 250,000 strikes per die, the total number of Philadelphia, Type II, 1979 Susan B. Anthony dollars amounts to 160,750,000."

With today's hindsight, I think it was 643 dies made, but not necessarily used. I think Dr. Hunter was sincere, but mistaken in the total mintage.

In this case Walter Breen was working from a full deck and not making up numbers, although I would say the correctly quoted number is proving to be quite wrong indeed.

Herb

edited to correct the spelling of "the" of all things
edited to add another paragraph in the Auust 5, 1981 letter and adjust the last sentence.

ModernDollarNut · August 28, 2008 4:20AM

<< Let us remember that the time of mintage had nothing to do with the time of release. The fact that some wide rims were to be found among the coins first release tells us nothing about when the coin was minted, other than that it wasn't minted after it was released

It has long been my understanding that the wide rims were to be found among the last coins produced with the date 1979. Wasn't the change made late in the production run? >>

Sumnon, my earlier posting was not inaccurate - one can make some generalizations about the distribution of SBA's, at least if the initial release was comparable to that of the Philly Ikes which I have studied from mint records of shipments.

For a new and scheduled release, the Mints ship by the truckload (typically 30-40 thousand pounds of coins, roughly as they are minted, with but a brief holding time) to a rotation of the Federal Reserve Banks serviced by that Mint where the coins are accumulated in vault storage.

Philly serviced the large FRB's at Boston, NY. Philly, Baltimore, Cleveland (and I think Cincin), Atlanta and a number of smaller banks to the South (would you believe Choral Gables, FL?).

Each FRB accumulated and stored the Philly Ikes and presumably the '79-P SBA's until a few days before the release date when these FRB's began shipping to their customer commercial and private banks.

The FRB storge vaults are typically largish rooms (guess 20X20X10 based on a picture in one of the Anual Reports...?) which could accomodate a large number of palates with bags and/or loose bags.

Say Boston got 10% of the Philly Mint's production of '79-P SBA's and this production had been completed and stored at the Boston FRB in anticipation of the public release Nov 1, '79. Rough numbers, 30M '79-P SBA's would require 30M/150K per palate = 200 palates. 200 palates stacked 4 high = 7X7 palate footprint on the floor of a vault which would require roughly 20' X 20' of floor space if packed tightly.

All hypothetical, but fun to try to visualize and it leaves me with the distinct possibility that the last SBA's minted would be roughly the first to reach circulation and thus the Wide Rim was minted late in the year.

I really like Herb's thought that production was probably terminated ahead of schedule and therefore all the un-used WR dies had to be discarded.

It is clear that these vaults were manually filled and emptied using typical ware-house fork-lifts so the earliest Mint shipments would be first in to the vaults and thus last out while the latest Mint shiplments would be last in and this first out.

I've seen enough bank and other business "First day of release" publicity cards with WR SBA's to feel pretty secure that the WR's were maybe as common as 5-10% of the first release '79-P SBA's.

I'm not saying this in any way proves that WR's were minted late in the year but the scenario is suggestive.

That the WR's are more dinged is possibly consistent with mint personel no longer giving much of a damn about the their quality as 1979 production was prematurely coming to a halt. In fact, all regular production of SBA's was permenantly halted in March of 1980, talk about a short run, until the somewhat strange SBA minting in 1999. Guess it was thanks to the casino lobby. Rob

ProofArtworkonCircs · August 28, 2008 10:51AM

I have edited my last post to include another paragraph of the mint August 5, 1981 letter. I hope this settles which version came first. It states that the wide rim, near date was the revised design. We could have called that coin "the reverse of 1980" which gives another clue as to which was first.

Although it is unusual for the mint to change designs in the middle of the year, it has happened quite a few times in the dollars of the 1970's.
Consider the 1976 obverse - relief lowered, some minor changes
1976 reverse - relief increased, lettering changed, UNUM centered under PLURIBUS
1972 - 3 reverses used for Philadelphia business strikes alone including the very scarce T 2.
1971 - 3 reverses used including the scarce one year only 1971 D FEV.
1971 and 1972 had high relief obverses for proofs only.

edited to mention the 1972 Philly T 2.

ModernDollarNut · August 28, 2008 11:45AM

Herb, bless you for mentioning probably the most important Ike reverse design , the FEV! I will do everything I can to get FEV elected President of the United States of America!! Oops, wrong blog. . .

It's always fun when my rediculously long-winded thinking seems to be on target. Wish that were always the case. But the times I am right, (a prime example is the importance of that 1971-D FEV) charge my batteries, let me tell you! Rob

Snowman24 · August 29, 2008 12:56AM

while looking for Cheerios Sac's before the Pres dollars came out

i came across 492 1979P's and only 5 were wide rims

so that 1% for me

Snowman

ModernDollarNut · August 29, 2008 1:54AM

Snowman24 (and others), right on. My experience with maybe 4,000 '79-P's is 1.5% WR's but we're all in the same tight low range.

As I wrote above, the exception, which seemed paradoxial at the time was finding roughly 10% WR's in "First Day of Issue" advertising cards and brochures with a '79-P SBA's attached. Of course, that was a small sample, maybe 50 such all total at shows and ebay mostly, and of course I bought at no premium all those with Near Dates. Rob

mgoodm3 · August 29, 2008 2:10AM

Back in 1979 my uncle went to the bank and got me 10 of the new dollars. I squirreled them away and over the years gave a few away. I have three left and they are all wide-rim. I didn't figure out the wide-rim thing until fairly recently.

Mark.

Any mintage numbers on the 79' Wide Rim SBA?

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