69s DDO or MD?

[coppercoins]

Regarding what constitutes an error and what doesn't:

In my mind I imagine a snooty mint cop out there wanting to confiscate every coin in the hands of collectors that should never have made it out of the mint.

I look at a coin with an anomaly and ask myself if the snooty mint police would care about this coin. If not - it's not an error. If so - then it's an error.

Errors are ONLY those coins that escape the process at the mint when they should have been swept aside, melted, and made into different coins. Brockages, indents, capped dies, severe clashes, CUD, severe die cracks, broken die strikes, set-up strikes, off-center strikes, misaligned die strikes, double struck coins, saddle strikes...and the list goes on.

If my mother could see there's something wrong with the coin - it's an error. If it took a microscope and five minutes to explain it to her - it's not an error. It's just one of the many little things that can happen during a mechanical process that makes millions of pieces a day.

[coppercoins]

In reality - there are snooty mint cops - they are called "the Secret Service" - but they are only going after the back door "mint errors" that got out and shouldn't have. Ones that were discovered and swiped from the reject bins and sold to dealers. They wouldn't really care about our off-center coins or die cracks.

My "snooty mint cop" is an imaginary totally anal guy who behaves worse than the IRS and wants to deflate the error coin industry completely by melting all the error coins. He wouldn't care about machine doubling and die cracks.

[jallengomez]

My "snooty mint cop" is an imaginary totally anal guy who behaves worse than the IRS and wants to deflate the error coin industry completely by melting all the error coins. He wouldn't care about machine doubling and die cracks.

Would he care about a tilted, split-serif RPM?

[georoxx]

Would he care about a tilted, split-serif RPM?

Book 'im, Dano.

[coppercoins]

Would he care about a tilted, split-serif RPM?

Definitely not. But then again, those are usually not worth much either.

[jallengomez]

Definitely not. But then again, those are usually not worth much either.

That's very true. It's just that, absent documentation from the mint, I have a real hard time with an anomaly being within "mint tolerances." Sure we can surmise that because coins with <X degrees of rotation are common, they must surely be within tolerance, or a coin with a certain amount of MD is very common and thus must be within tolerance. We could also surmise that, as a genre, split-serif RPMs are also very common and must therefore also be within mint tolerance. Each person has their own definition of error, but I think it has to be, almost ipso facto, any coin that deviates from the intention. Am I saying that they should all have exaggerated value? No.

[jallengomez]

And I'll add that I maintain the view that I hold because it's the only one that I've been able to find that doesn't run aground of logical inconsistencies. However, I've never seen documents from the mint stating their tolerances, so that plays a big part in it. If I were to be privy to those documents, my view would certainly be open to change.

[coppercoins]

I suppose mint tolerances are obvious when one of every 50 coins has machine doubling to some degree. Mint tolerances become obvious when in certain years almost every coin has a die crack of some sort.

[1jackel1]

I do agree with Charles on most of this but in over all terms when it comes to selling these md coins and i state this as strong md and not light md as they carry no value at all but some of these coins i have seen and sold as md for over 50 dollars, to say that they have no interest is wrong and not only do new collectors collect them but even seasoned collectors collect them too, i only collect the ones that show massive md.

every collector has there own ideas of these but in reality they do sell well when they are strong md even though they are just md after all.

George.