For those of you in the T.O. area here's a good show in Hamilton this year. The annual ONA Convention & coin show, this year in Hamilton on Upper James St, is always a good time with lots of folks, many dealers with very good presentations and talks. Starts next Friday thru Sunday at the Courtyard M...

It looks like both the die and the coin have been polished by sandpaper, and not a fine grit either.

Yes mechanical and machine doubling are 2 ways to say the same thing. Here's a link that has some links to other types of "not-die doubling". MD is when the die is a little loose in the keepers and slightly moves as the die is coming up just after making the strike .. you get a small mirror image as...

No, MD, machine doubling

Yep, garage bench work is getting lots of novel uses the last few years.

Yes, I know that no mintmark is Philadelphia, but I thought that they had just left any mintmark off the holder and ads. I usually see just the Carson City, New Orleans, or San Fran mintmarks for the 1880's dollars but, looking at the book, the Philly mint produced millions more, normally, than the ...

Which mintmarks. I find it hard to believe that it's not on the holder.

Well, it's a long way from BU and heavily polished. I think XF-40, maybe +.

Back in the later 19th century, striking coins isn't like today as the pressures involved were less than now and much older machinery. I was unclear in my post about what took 2-4 slams. I was talking about the die making as they were struck from the master, matrix or submatrix. I used the wrong wor...

Is there a ding or external mark that shows it was knocked off? The photo is very blurry. Or it could be that it was struck thru a small piece that was in the other :I:'

Off-center strike. NICE coin! One of the "error" people will chime in as far as value. I don't know errors.

I am as far away from a person who can properly grade coins above 50 as you can get, but the '89 doesn't look right. Compare the serifs on the E's and I's. When the fakers use computer and laser copies of an existing coins, you can sometimes see that the serifs on some letters just don't come out ri...

By getting the number of dies used from the RCM (good luck) and dividing it into the total mintage, you can get an "average" of how many coins each die produced. But, most dies are not controlled by an average. Some dies may have produced well less than 100,000 coins and some may have produced a mil...

Great, interesting photography; thanks

The photos showing the coin in the TCNC auction linked above, shows sign of the bronze base metal under the grey tin-like surface. I, personally, don't think that the coin is "tin", but it was the result of an improper alloy mix in the pour into the ingots which were then rolled to make the sheets f...