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In MS 67 is clad tougher than silver?
tydye
Posts: 3,894 ✭✭✭
Specifically 65-98 quarters vs 64 and earlier.
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Russ, NCNE
Russ, NCNE
<< <i>Comparing a pcgs ms67 silver quarter with a pcgs ms67 clad is like comparing apples and oranges. Overall clad quarters were more poorly produced and much more banged up. Esp quarters 1985-1994 are horribly banged up. If pcgs graded them the same as a silver or even a 1970-d clad, none would grade above ms65. A pcgs ms67 1991-p for example will show some marks and be more equivalent to a silver ms65. >>
One of the problems with the clads are retained planchet marking. The planchets
are roughed up to make them easier for the automatic equipment to handle and
then the metal is so hard and strikes so weak that the scratches are often still vis-
ible.
Quality control has suffered over the years as well and many more dies go into
service with poor alignment. While now days worn dies are swapped out on a
timely basis usually this was not true up until the late '90's.
The clads are tough and don't take marking as easily. They're a little lighter so
there's less weight to mark them. Some dates still get banged up extensively.
The silver coins were mostly saved randomly; a superb example was little more
likely to be saved than an inferior one. There wasn't much difference in most cases
so less reason to care. Some superb examples just happened to get saved by
the laws of chance.
The clads were saved randomly at first as well. Though they were so horrid in
many cases that the date was hardly saved at all. There is a high correlation in
availability with the quality of the issue caused by this effect. It's nearly as great
as the inverse correlation to mintage. In other words good quality and low mintage
was saved preferentially. Poor quality high mintage clad is tough.
In later years there has been a lot more saving of high quality specimens.
Many of the highest quality clads appear in mint sets. This varies wildly from date
to date and mint to mint but generally the bulk of the best coins made for a given date
wentr into mint sets. They can still be distressingly tough to find as the '91-P exam-
ple above. The mint set coins aren't all gems and some suffer from extensive mark-
ing on almost all specimens.
Truly gem clads from before 1999 can be extremely elusive but some are nearly com-
mon. The '72-D for example probably exists as a gem in nearly 100,000 coins. Others
in true well struck gem free from marking are far tougher than almost any of the silver
issues. Perhaps none rival the '32-D but you might think so if you look for a nice clean
'69 or a well struck '82-P.
A lot depends on your grading standards but nice clean well struck clads of many dates
are far more elusive than comparable quality silver. Part of the reason is you can find
lots of silver rolls and many of these will have a gem or two. You can't even find clad
rolls because they were so horribly made and no one cared. The best bet is to look at
a few of each date mint sets to get an idea of what's available for a given date. Many
of these sets are gone now and some are picked over so you'll just get an approxima-
tion but for quarters it's a good approximation since they aren't picked over heavily for
quarters.
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Found 2 so far and of course they are the dates mentioned here as being easier. 70-d and 72-d
I did notice on my last submission that PCGS has different standards for them as mentioned. 2 silvers that I thought were easy 65s came back a 64s while a clad that I thought was 66 came back 67